Any body able to sell beef or deer hides? Each year we buy a couple hundred deer and a couple dozen beef hides. We usually only make a dollar on the deer and a few bucks on the beef. Asking around this year it seems I might have to pay to get rid of them? Has anyone else heard anything? I know of a couple of butcher plant that are having to pay 4-5 $ each to have the beef hides hauled away. These are locker plant hides, which usually bring more than the farmer skinned hides I get.

Most were sold to China so I am thinking good luck.

A friend of mine is a slaughter house foreman and I heard from him that cow hides are worthless right now. My grandad ran a slaughter house when I was growing up and we hand salted them flesh side up in a pile till it got so high we couldn't throw another one on top lol.
I think I remember em being 18-20 dollars each back then. I still remember the difference in weight from a brahmer hide and a Hereford. The guys that came to get them were always from Canada, and were commercial fisherman as well.

It's no huge deal financially for me, just some thing I have done for 25+ years, people have just brought them to me and I pay a dollar less than I know I can get for them. It's more of a pain than a profitable thing. But if the butcher plant are needing to pay to get rid of them this is a big deal. It was only a couple years ago they were getting 40$ each. Even some of the smaller plants will kill 10-15 animals a day. do the math on that.

Not many shoes/boots are made here anymore, or even made with leather.

It's like furs, there is a glut and very little demand for hides.

I've been looking into it a little, seems to be another casualty if the trade war. Leather and fur are like comparing apples to onions. Most of the leather from beef and other large animals is used for utilitarian purposes. The demand is there, but the tanneries and shoe/boot makers are mostly in China. Living in rural Wisconsin I have yet to find anyone who is coming out ahead in this trade war we are in. You can't find a farmer who is doing better than they were a few years ago. Some are still hoping things will get better, and many others have been forced to go out of business often through bankruptcy. Maybe your stock portfolio is looking better, but things sure aren't better in the daily lives of anyone I meet.

I've been slaughtering livestock at the locker here in town for 24 years. Beef hides used to pay the utility bill, the past 3 months or so I've thrown them in the dumpster

Lots of new vehicles have leather interior. Where does it come from. I am sitting in a new leather recliner and wearing leather topsiders and a leather belt.

Very few tannerys in the US. It's probably cheaper for them to get hides from other countries. China makes lots of leather, Brazil, Italy...we used to back in the day. But it's hard to do with out causing environment issues.

The larger dealers I have talked to say it nearly all goes to China to be tanned. The demand for leather is about as good as ever, but we now can't sell it to the buyer for political reasons. Along with much of the rest of what rural America produces. We may never get those buyers back, they will find other sources.

Deer and beef hide have been cheap for years. This isn't something that started up with the so called trade war.
January 1, 2019 7:00am
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CATTLE hide prices have collapsed with reports processors are struggling to sell small and secondary types while the best hides off young southern animals are now averaging less than $20 each.

We were getting 7-8$ for deer and 20-25$ for beef up until about 3 years ago.It was even better several years ago. The locker plants would pay for a lot of labor and other expenses with the hides. Now it costs money to get rid of them? What has changed?

I agree with MJM, the buyer I know does truck loads, often.

It’s gonna get better guys, let Trump work his magic and we will be Winners.

In the 80's I hauled many truck loads of hides from a processing plant in Dodge City to Johnstown NY. Place was huge. They made leather from deer elk and beef hides. The pallets of salted deer hides would literally cover half a football field 4 feet high. They bought many more beef hides. At that time high plains packing was sending them 3000 hides a week. The plant is still there but now its called national beef.

Any way that's all gone. Those hides all go to China in those metal containers. Its not good when your country cant turn beef hides into usable leather. We need to start producing what we consume ourselves again.

Where I used to take my carcasses is a dead stock place with a small fox fur farm. They used to take all wildlife carcasses, deer road kills, and bones etc. Now they do none of those. They take their products to another place that pays better but takes none of those items. The father of the current owner used to buy 5-8 K of deer hides every year plus their thousands of cattle hides. That business is now gone as well.
I don't know how political this whole thing is but these guys were up to speed on this over a year and half ago and made their business decisions before the new reality hit.

Bryce