Set Blaze At Edmonds Mink-Food Plant `Futile'

The president of the Northwest Farm Food Cooperative was puzzled when animal-rights activists apparently tried to burn down the food source for mink on Snohomish County fur farms.

"We do find some irony in this," Harvey Beck said yesterday.

Saturday morning's fire flared up again yesterday, destroying a portion of the food stored in the Edmonds cooperative. The amount of food destroyed was not known this morning as firefighters guarded against another flare-up.

"I don't see any impact on the farmers themselves. They're alive and doing well," Beck said. "We've had people with hoods before going around setting fires - this is not going to work."

Mink farming in Snohomish County isn't as big as it used to be, according to Jeff Craggs, a second-generation fur breeder from Granite Falls who is on the board of directors at the farm-food cooperative and chief spokesman for the ranchers in this area.

He said there are about 20 mink farmers in Snohomish County, making it the largest concentration on the West Coast. The farms produce 125,000 to 150,000 pelts a year. At $30 a pelt, that's more than $4 million worth of furs.

But 60 farms existed when his father started mink farming after World War II, he said.

Mink breed in January and February, and their young are born in April and May. There are usually four kits in each litter. The mink consume byproducts from processing plants for fish, cattle and poultry.

The animals moult in the late summer and early fall, after which they produce their winter fur. They are harvested as mature animals in late November and December.

Fur farmers say the average life span of a farm-raised mink is 1.7 years, about the same as in the wild. But animal-rights activists say the mink are deprived of their natural setting and treated cruelly.

Previously called the Northwest Fur Breeders' Cooperative, the co-op has operated a plant on the Edmonds waterfront since 1947.

Dick Lever, the co-op's general manager, said the facility processes the inedible parts of chicken and fish before sending them on to mink ranches and pet-food companies. Over the years, the co-op has been increasing its pet-food business so that it now represents nearly half of the business, he said.

Vern Peterson, operations manager for the co-op, said the fire destroyed about 20,000 pounds of shredded wood used as mink bedding, about 120,000 paper bags - worth $35,000 - used for feed storage and about 10,000 pounds of ground corncob used in the processing of mink pelts. The majority of those materials were to be supplied to mink farmers, Peterson said.

Marsha Kelly, communications director for the Fur Farm Animal Welfare Coalition in St. Paul, Minn., said U.S. mink farms were warned to be on the lookout for further violence.

Kelly said her organization has also warned livestock and poultry farmers and animal-research labs against attacks by animal activists.

Washington and Idaho are tied for fifth in mink production, according to the Fur Farm Animal Welfare Coalition. In 1990, it said Washington farmers produced 165,000 mink pelts out of 3.4 million in the United States. That was down from 244,000 pelts in 1988.

Craggs said the fur market is back on the road to recovery after a period of overproduction in Scandinavia coupled with the U.S. recession.

Mink prices are up 15 to 45 percent at auctions this year, and virtually all the pelts offered by ranchers are being sold to buyers, Kelly said.