Well, what else are you going to do with that land? The whole point of raising livestock is that by doing so, you can make some productive use of poor-quality land that’d otherwise be going completely to waste. If you have good land, you don’t waste it on cattle: You grow wheat, or corn, or soybeans (or probably wheat or corn and soybeans, in rotation).
I personally prefer the rich leather from Corinth.
You see it everywhere in Ireland. There are cows and sheep grazing in fields on steep hills that are no good for anything else. If it’s too steep or rocky to drive a tractor on, put some cows or sheep on it.
Kaaaaahhhhhhhnnnnn!!!
Bolding mine - there are lots of people who have ruined expensive Gore-tex who could testify that this is absolutely not true.
I’m not sure that grazing land for cattle is typically “poor quality”. Cattle is much more demanding than, say, sheep or goats.
Tell that to the ranchers in Texas. Apparently Texas cows feed on mesquite, prickly pear cactus, and rocks (and maybe a smattering of speargrass). The quality of land used for grazing cattle is rather poor, but there is a lot of it.
It’s not just the lack of barbed wire. Bentley use some of the best
What do you think they do with land that is too rocky or steep to row crop? In my little town, where the surrounding farmland is mostly too rocky for crops, we have three stockyards.
To answer the OP’s question, some of the meat goes to ground beef blends and some goes to pet food. The hides are used for multiple types of leather goods, hooves and horns are ground for the gelatin and go to old school glue and bones are ground for feed and fertilizer additives.
The quality of the leather will also vary depending on what part of the cow it comes from. The skin in the neck and front torso is considerably thicker and tougher. I understand that sometimes it is sliced into thinner layers, hence the term split-grain leather verses full-grain leather. The skin along the loin, where the expensive beef is, will be a bit softer.
Says Tully Mars, who has skinned a few cows.
A semi-related question that I’ve been meaning to post for a while:
These days it seems that leather seating is available in almost any car you can buy, except for the very cheapest. For some luxury lines, it’s difficult or impossible to buy a car without it, at least in the US. My question is: where is all this leather coming from? In the 1980s and earlier, leather seats were available on only the top-of-the-line models. Are we eating more beef than we did back then?
Several reasons:
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Yes, we are eating more beef. We being worldwide, not just USA. US beef consumption has leveled off, but in other parts of the world there are now more people who can afford to eat beef more often.
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Dairy cows produce leather, too. And dairy farming is a very tight operation – when grain/forage prices rise, mny dairy farmers will get out of the market and sell off their herds.
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Technology has increased the supply of leather. By producing split-grain leather (sometimes splitting a hide several times). Also, technology reduces wasted leather. For example, the Red Wing Shoe Company near here produces a well-respected line of leather construction boots. They now use a computer-controlled machine that scans each leather hide, identifies imperfections in the leather, and re-arranges the cutting patterns so there is a minimum of wasted leather.
I have a custom made camera bag that is lined with pig suede. I never heard of pig suede before, but it’s both soft and tough. He described it to me, saying “Cloth wears out, this is what they use to make footballs!”
Leather for which you might not want to contemplate the source: eel skin. Comes from the hagfish.
Lazy googling didn’t provide an answer, but I thought leather prices had also come down because pigskin can now be tanned in such a way that it is more supple, like cow leather. Perhaps G"W"R can weigh in?
I can weigh in on cattle, since I used to raise Corrientes, but I know nothing about pigs except that they are delicious … and their hide has been used to make footballs for a long time.
The skin of the nauga is also a valuable source of leather.
As Alan Sherman noted:
My sofa’s upholstered in real Naugahyde.
When they killed that nauga, I sat down and cried.
ETA: Picture of a nauga.
Red Wing fan here. Penned, fattened cattle seems to give more consistent quality. Free range cattle hides sometimes have injuries, scars and irritations.
You should check out some of the cattle stations in Northern Australia some time. The only cattle tough enough to survive those conditions are of such poor quality they are only fit for export to South East Asia.
There was a major problem a few years back when the government ceased live cattle export to Indonesia following some reports of appalling treatment in abbatoirs over there.