mink sheds

I never knew what these were till this weekend

my son and I were moving my Great aunt back into her house for the summer , she winters with her daughter but loves getting back to her own house in the woods.

she lives in the house her Grandfather my Great great grandfather built in 1888 he was a boat builder and part owner in a saw mill and had a mercantile also.

my great Grandfather my Great Aunts father was a commercial fisherman this building was near his dock , there are many like it they are back off the water about 300 yards I had always figured with as long as they were some sort of net repair or storage sheds

She told us as we were driving around getting a history lesson about where the different family docks and sheds and such were at and where she swam as a kid , she turns 90 this summer.

well those long sheds were the mink sheds nearly every commercial fisherman at the time other than her dad also had mink to feed all their fish carcasses and guts to , I suppose he may have had a deal with someone for his fish entrails for their mink , he did more net repair and making I think.
his son my great uncle was still making and fixing nets till just a year before he passed in 2019.

I imaging when freeze up was happening and you couldn't open water fish and you couldn't ice fish yet , mink were about in their prime and you could be processing prime fur for market.

I have spent years looking in the spring and have yet to find a mink shed. I must be looking in the wrong places.

I was expecting a minkalope.

sorry , just old buildings that were once a part of the fur trade , turn your fish entrails into fine clothing.

now that I think about it Great grandpa always had some pigs , I bet he turned his fish entrails into bacon.

Yup those used to pepper the landscape. Today rather obsolete

Most mink farmers I knew would never feed 'random' raw fish to their ranch mink, not that those that ground their own feed didn't use fish, but fish has to have a certain ash content to it to be fed to mink or it can cause serious digestion problem, something no rancher would be willing to risk !

Depends on the specie. Some had to be cooked

Northern Wisc still has alot of mink sheds around.

Old mink farmer by me ground old horses and cows. A lot of work before pelletized mink food.

Interesting

i had a friend that had raised mink. He trapped also. He was in his 80's when I would ask him to go set traps with me. He said that he would buy Purina mink feed. If I remember right, this feed was in a frozen cube or block form.

well I don't have any details on how they fed or mixed or dried or cooked

not sure how great of mink ranchers they were , just that they were fisherman with a mink ranch near their docks.

my family didn't participate in this activity they seemed to have mainly done net repair

the fish would be whitefish , perch , alewife ,chubs and maybe some fresh water bubot and herring

whitefish was a mainstay of the area fishing



I did get some fried Fresh water Burbot Saturday so good and has been a long time since I got any.

Found this at an antique store years ago.







Susan cleaned it up a bit

I recall guy near here used muskrat carcasses for feed. They ground them up shot a ball on top cage mink pulled it threw wire.

Mac

Large numbers of ranch mink were produced along the shores of the Great Lakes because of the commercial fisheries there and the large quantities of fish species produced that had little value for human consumption. However, when alewife and smelt invaded the lakes and increased to very high populations in the near absence of predators caused by the parasitic sea lamprey, the mink farmers utilized those two species as their primary mink food and mink reproduction collapsed due to the very high levels of thiaminase(an enzyme) in both species. The enzyme greatly reduced thiamine(an essential nutrient) necessary for mink reproduction. This was fairly sophisticated biology at the time and was not initially detected as the cause of the reproductive problem. Cooking the fish at moderately high temperature would have destroyed the enzyme and alleviated he problem.

We have a lot of abandoned mink sheds along the Lake Michigan shore in WI from north of GreenBay down to Sheboygan CO and west to Lake Winnegabo. Not only the fish but the huge supply of down cattle and horses along this area coupled with the cooler spring and summer weather and more cloudy weather produced better fur. Similar situation in Taylor CO WI . Now very few ranches are left. The largest mink ranch in the western hemisphere is located about 25 miles south of me in 4 locations and they pelt upwords of 400K mink in a season.
Historically many smaller ranches were associated with dairy farms in WI as the farmers were home a lot and the real busy mink seasons come when dairy farm labor needs were lower, November-December for pelting and March for breeding. Dairy farms were the home of many side industries in WI. In southern WI it was dairy and tobacco, in Central WI it was dairy and cucumbers. where I grew up it was dairy and strawberries, in northern WI it was dairy and mink and in Marathon Co it was dairy and ginsing. And many dairy farms also had saw mills as well.

Bryce

Where I live Dairy and Cheese were and still are big

Tabaco and cucumbers were big , but are almost dead now.

market gardens for feeding farmers markets and fresh summer veg took over a little of the ground Tabaco and cucumbers for pickles once held.

most everything else is row crop or hay

seems the most common side labors for farmers in my area currently is trucking and custom hay operations.
if you have to have a big truck to haul your grain to the bins or hay to the bunkers, might as well keep it running and hire the service to others.

if you have a 36 foot merger and big bailer might as well keep it running and make LOTs of hay while the sun shines
bale wrapping is also big.

Where I live In Oregon WI there were 5 mink ranches within 20 mile of me. And 2 of those were within 3 miles.

None to be seen now.

Medford Wi. was the mink capital of the world.

I was always told lake county IL was the largest area for mink ranches per capita. But I have nothing to really prove that. But there where lots is them I know that. Still see lots of abandoned cages at stuff all over the woods.

You probably didn't know many mink farmers from back in those times. Sounds like a good use of waste fish. I'm sure that the wild mink of that time never checked the "ash" content of the fish, like they do today.

Some of the research on PCB's came from ranch mink being fed PCB contaminated fish from the great lakes. Mink are very intolerant of even low levels of PCB's.

Alewife’s and salmon are short termed fish in that lake. Not many if at all pcbs were found it those species. Those biologist really put a bad rap on 90 percent of the Great Lakes fisheries

I worked on a mink ranch for 4 years when a young guy. Owners son and I were good friends, we used to fish lake Erie 2-3 days per week for walleye and smallmouth. As usual, we'd catch a ton of sheepshead and we'd fill up 5 gal pails with them to throw in the grinder for mink. Was always funny pulling back into the boat launch and guys would as how we did...we'd say great and show them the buckets of sheepshead and act proud...man we got some looks...and we never had a sick mink.

Mink food was made by mixing dry pellets along with many other ingredients. We did a weekly run to the slaughter houses and purchase tripe and other cattle organs in 55 gal drums, go the the chicken farms and buy vats of cockrels that were blast frozen, along with wings...this before wings were a thing, at .05 a lb. We'd go to the cheese factory that made ricotta and cottage cheese, buy all their stuff that was store date expired for a couple bucks per case. All this got ground up, water added until you had a nice pasty consistency, then transfer to the feed tractor that had an auger to push this paste through a tube. Drive down through the pens plopping a pile on top of each cage, the mink would pull it through the wire.

Was a lot of work taking care of 3000 mink, cleaning poop piles, feeding, breeding (where I always got bit a few times as you are handling mink), and then the skinning season, usually 3rd week in November. During skinning time we'd hire 4-5 trappers we knew of as they knew something about skinning.

There were more than a few mink ranches along Lake of the Woods that used the bycatch from commercial fishing on said lake. They are all gone now. Unfortunate!

I might add that cooking devalues the food source and many ranchers would pass because it had to be cooked. Mink nutrition is science. Pretty fascinating industry all around imo. It is unfortunate that it no longer fits in today’s world.

Ranch mink have one of the shortest digiestive systems of any mammal and thus need very easily digested protein and protein with high fat and extremely low fiber. There is a real science to feeding, breeding and raising mink and keeping records for breeding stock is a huge job when you are dealing with thousands of animals and tracking history etc. One of the huge losses when mink are released and the animals don't have chips or tags is losing all those years of breeding records.

Bryce