Fifty years of mink farming

By Jonathan Riley

DIGBY COURIER

NovaNewsNow.com

Genos Sullivan has worked on the Hillsdale Fur Farm for 50 years.

He started there in 1957, helping out during pelting season. “They told me it would be for just a few days until the work was done. Well I ain’t got those few days’ work done yet. I’m slow I guess.”

Farm president Lindon Mullen says Genos is the reason the farm is still going today. “He’s been a great help to me, I’ll tell you that.”

Genos was foreman at the farm under Lindon’s father Earl and ran the farm when Earl got sick. “He bridged the gap you could say,” says Lindon who took over in 1984.

Genos started at the farm just as the Mullens decided to take mink ranching more seriously.

Up until that time, Earl had run a general store, kept turkeys and operated a large strawberry farm on top of the mink farming. “They really started going for it in 1958,” recalls Genos. “This became his sole income from then on.”

The farm employed about three men when Genos started – now there are 15 employees year round and upwards of 30 in the summer months.

The number of mink has grown a little too. “They had about 2,800 mink here when I started,” says Genos. “Now we have more than that in one shed.”

In fact they mated 20,000 females and 4,000 males in March and expect they’ll have 100,000 mink when the births wrap up this week. “Let me put it to you this way,” says Genos of the changes. “If you were feeding a couple kids at home, that’s one thing. Then if you went up there and were preparing meals for the college, that’d be a little different wouldn’t it.”

They used to haul all their fish for food in a pick up – today three large flatbeds haul in 80,000 pound of fish a day in the summer.

Genos remembers feeding the mink with a spoon. “You carried everything back then. We carried the feed in 20-quart buckets.”

Today they use forklifts for most of the lifting and the food is dispensed using feed carts – gas-powered vehicles half as wide as a golf cart with a stainless steel bathtub on back that holds 2,000 pounds of food.

The driver steers with one hand and in the other he holds a hose like a vacuum cleaner for dropping food onto the wire cages.

Lindon says he can unload a feed cart in 15 minutes and be back for a second load.

Genos remembers when driving a car through the sheds was unthinkable. “You had to be right quiet in the sheds – talking in whispers and no loud noises. If you were wearing a red shirt one day, they didn’t want you to change it – they didn’t want to upset the mothers. “Now we feed them with a cart with a motor onto it. Nothing bothers them. You could haul this shed to Digby with a dozer and no one would even notice.”

He says that’s part breeding and partly what the animals get used to. Over the years he says they have been able to select for temperament, size, colour – just about anything. “They are bigger mink today than they were 30-40 years ago, there’s no doubt. And they’re not as nervous – they’re almost domesticated. “Now if you have a mother who is a little bit mouthy, and you keep her kits, you’ll get more that are hard to handle.”

Genos’ son Paul has followed him into mink farming. Paul used to work at the Hillsdale farm but now he works construction contracts – mostly for various mink ranchers.

Paul’s daughter Kristy, in grade 5 at Barton Elementary, recently did her heritage fair project on the farm where her grandfather has worked for 50 years.

Hers ands four other projects went onto regional competitions in Yarmouth last week.

Genos says he has enjoyed his fifty years on the farm and says he’ll keep coming to work as long as he can walk. “I don’t have anything else to do. And this is pretty good work.”

He estimates about 95 per cent of mink farming is different today than when he started. Though some things haven’t changed.

He can hear if a mink is cold or unhappy just by the sound it makes, before he even looks in the pen.

And - “The mink still bite out of the same end.”