What becomes of the dead mink post-skinning on those mink ranches? Ground into cattle feed protein? Dog food? Mink fillets? Tossed into a pile behind the ranch?
Tried to Google this, but “dead mink” gives you lots of anti-fur sites and not much in the ways of what to do with a dead mink.
{Homer/]
Mmmmm…mink!
[/Homer]
Did you try “mink ranching carcasses”? 
Looks like some of them end up as fertilizer.
http://www.nsac.ns.ca/rgs/research/articles/index%20(2000).htm
Google for “mink” and “waste” and you’ll have better luck. From what I understand, dead minks are dumped whole into whatever waste system is legal or convenient (not necessarily both). While it’s apparently legal to use them for animal food, it’s not all that common. They really ought to be incinerated instead of going to landfill, but apparently that doesn’t happen either.
Years ago, I visited a place called Space Farms in NW New Jersey.
It was a roadside zoo & museum. IIRC, it started out as a dairy farm that became a mink ranch. The carcasses were sold to NYC zoos as food, which ended up with some barter of surplus animals which became the zoo, which ate the mink, which - well you get the idea…
Definitely an odd place - Parade Mag once listed it in the top 10 Worst Zoos in the US.
I should tell you the story of the male lion there that I saw mark ‘his’ territory… if that had been my girlfriend … Well, I still wonder about that drive home…
Probably the strangest school issued items I ever received was the fur mink we dissected in my anatomy class during high school. This would have been 1994 in Illinois.
Its head and neck were burned and much of the flesh was actually charred. They had, of course, been carefully skinned and really were unpleasant looking. I don’t remember if it was the teacher or what but the general attitude was “At least Some good will come from their lives”.
We couldn’t cut of the heads but it was only gross for a day or so of the weeklong project.
No idea where they came from.
I dissected mink for a college undergrad bio class. They came (we were told) from a fur farm somewhere in upstate PA. They were extremely carefully skinned, of course, but otherwise in good shape preservation-wise. Internally, the mink were in very sad shape, as many of our specimens had considerable kidney damage and most showed signs of chronic worm infestations.