Fur-Bearing Animal and Rabbit Production (United States) — NAICS 112930

An investor's primer. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) 2022 code 112930.

1. Overview

This industry is the farm-side raising of animals for their fur and, secondarily, for rabbit meat, fiber, pelts, and laboratory use. In practice it is two very different small businesses under one code: mink ranching — a commodity pelt producer selling into the global luxury-fur trade — and rabbit production, a fragmented niche of meat, fiber, and pet/lab breeders. Fox and chinchilla farming exist but are tiny.[1]

Why anyone assessing the industry might care: this is a textbook structurally declining commodity producer. U.S. mink pelt output has fallen roughly 80% in a decade, the number of farms has more than halved, luxury brands and two U.S. states have turned against fur at retail, and disease risk (COVID-era SARS-CoV-2, H5N1 avian flu) hangs over the herd. It is a useful case study in how a small agricultural niche behaves when demand permanently erodes — and a cautionary tale on illiquidity and regulatory tail-risk.

Ways in are limited. There is no U.S.-listed pure-play producer. Public-market exposure is indirect: a Finnish fur-auction house (the closest proxy), a luxury conglomerate that still buys certified fur, and a former fur user that has exited. Everything else is private: family mink ranches, a marketing cooperative, small rabbit processors and grower networks. For most investors this is a "know-it, don't-own-it" industry; private investors have somewhat more direct entry through farms, processors, and channel infrastructure.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS 112930 covers establishments primarily engaged in raising fur-bearing animals (mink, fox, chinchilla) and rabbits. Rabbits here are raised for meat, Angora wool (fiber), pelts, laboratory research, and the pet/show trade.[1]

What it excludes (and the adjacent codes). The code is narrower than "the fur business." It does not include:

• Hunting and trapping of wild fur-bearers — NAICS 114210. (This matters for investors: some famous "fur" names, e.g. coyote-trim parkas, use wild-trapped fur, which sits outside farmed 112930 entirely.)[1]
• Fur dressing and tanning (turning raw pelts into finished pelts/leather) — NAICS 316110, Leather and Hide Tanning and Finishing.
• Fur garment manufacturing — NAICS 315 (apparel).
• Other farmed livestock, each with its own code: cattle, hogs, poultry, sheep, horses (NAICS 112920), bees (112910), and the catch-all NAICS 112990, All Other Animal Production (which also absorbs laboratory-animal and companion-animal breeding when that is the primary activity). Fish and shellfish farming are aquaculture (NAICS 112510).[1]

So 112930 captures only the living-animal, on-farm step. The dressing houses, auction houses, and coat makers downstream sit in other industries — and, notably, the value chain is far more concentrated after the farm gate (feed prep, grading, auction, export logistics, luxury manufacturing), where channel power and bottlenecks live.

Ownership mix. Almost entirely private, family-owned, single-location operations. Fur Commission USA describes most operating U.S. mink farms as third- and fourth-generation family businesses.[14] Mink is capital- and labor-intensive and clustered in a handful of Upper-Midwest and Western states; rabbit is a long tail of very small breeders, increasingly paired with a few processors running company farms plus independent grower networks. There is no meaningful corporate or public-company ownership of U.S. production. The nearest thing to a shared institution is a marketing cooperative (American Legend Cooperative) that pools and auctions members' pelts.

3. How big it is

A caveat first, because it matters here. The standard U.S. business statistics investors reach for — the Economic Census and County Business Patterns (establishment counts, receipts, payroll) — exclude crop and animal production (NAICS 111 and 112) entirely.[2] So the usual establishment/receipts/payroll figures are simply not available for this code. Our ingested federal dataset for 112930 carries only one figure: the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard of $3.75 million in average annual receipts, below which a firm counts as "small" for federal programs.[3] That is an eligibility threshold, not an estimate of industry revenue. The authoritative counts come instead from USDA's Census of Agriculture (every five years, using a broad $1,000-in-sales farm threshold) and, for mink, its now-discontinued NASS survey. The coverage gap here is agricultural scope and tiny family operations — not government ownership or suppression.[2][6][7]

Mink (the dollar core of the industry). Per USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), U.S. mink pelt production in the 2024 crop year was 771,200 pelts worth $28.1 million, at an average $36.40 per pelt — down 19% in volume and 14% in value from 2023 (957,410 pelts, $32.6 million).[4] The long slide is stark:

Source: USDA NASS Mink (July 2025).[4] For historical scale, the industry ran ~6,000 farms and ~6.2 million pelts at its mid-1960s peak.[5]

Production is now concentrated in four states with disclosed output: Wisconsin (438,710 pelts in 2024, the clear leader), Utah (95,230), Oregon (60,400), and Idaho (54,800), with Michigan and Washington withheld to protect individual operations.[4] Roughly two-thirds of pelts are the black color class.[4] Herd intentions are shrinking further: females bred to produce 2025 kits totaled just 196,800, down 7% year over year.[4]

Farm counts (Census of Agriculture). USDA's Census recorded 236 mink farms in 2017 falling to 110 in 2022, with the reported value of U.S. mink down about two-thirds over that span.[6][7] The 2022 Census counted 110 mink farms holding 307,834 mink in inventory; separately, only 13 farms reported live-mink sales of 7,560 animals worth $1.269 million — a reminder that most mink are pelted, not sold live, so the NASS pelt series above is the better read on economic scale.[6] (Advocacy tallies of "~275 mink / ~400 fur farms" circulate but predate the latest census; treat the census figures as ground truth.)

Rabbit. The 2022 Census counted about 6,400 farms holding 199,126 rabbits in inventory; of these, 3,058 farms reported sales of 438,955 live rabbits worth $8.571 million.[6] Output is spread thin across meat, Angora fiber (a "cottage industry" of hand-spinners and direct sellers), laboratory supply, and pets/show; no single figure captures total farm-gate value including processed meat, but the live-animal number frames the scale as modest relative to mink's pelt revenue.[6][8]

Bottom line on size: the entire NAICS 112930 industry — mink plus rabbit plus a sliver of fox/chinchilla — is a tens-of-millions-of-dollars farm-gate business and shrinking, not a sector in any portfolio sense.

4. The investable universe

There is no U.S.-listed company whose business is fur-bearing-animal or rabbit farming. The names below are the closest public and private touchpoints — most are downstream of the farm (auctions, luxury, processing), not producers. (Tickers and scale are given here and in §10 only; they are context, not a buy list.)

Public / listed

There is no ETF or index that targets this industry.

Private owners and operators

Saga Furs aside, participation means owning or lending to a private farm/processor — illiquid, cyclical, headline-exposed. The collapse of the two largest Western auction houses (NAFA in 2019; Kopenhagen Fur's wind-down) has itself removed price-discovery and marketing infrastructure U.S. producers relied on.[10] Public data does not support a full ranking of private owners.

5. How the money works

Mink — a price-taking commodity producer. Economics reduce to pelts produced × auction price, against a largely fixed cost base of feed (fish, poultry and dairy by-products), labor, veterinary care, and the seasonal cost of pelting. Biology sets a single annual cycle: a rancher sizes the herd by females bred in winter, kits are born in spring, and animals are pelted in late fall. That makes the business working-capital-heavy and slow to adjust — you commit the breeding herd almost a year before you learn the price you'll get. The operating metrics that matter: pelts produced and sold, average realized price per pelt, color and quality grade, female breeding inventory and kit survival, feed cost per animal, and mortality.

Revenue is set at international auction, historically in Denmark, Finland and Toronto. Ranchers are price-takers with no pricing power, and the price is brutally cyclical: it topped roughly $94 per pelt in 2011 and sank to about $21 in 2019 before the recent partial recovery to the mid-$30s.[4] When the auction clears below a rancher's roughly $30-ish cost of production, the operation loses money — which is exactly why farm counts have more than halved since 2017. This is the core of the money story: thin, volatile, often-negative margins in a shrinking market, with survival tied to scale, low feed cost, and vertical integration (in-house feed prep, grading, traceability).

Rabbit — niche unit economics. Meat rabbitries live on does × litters per year × kits weaned × feed-conversion efficiency, selling "fryers" (~4.5–5 lb live, 8–12 weeks) into ethnic, restaurant, and specialty channels. Angora producers sell fiber, largely direct-to-consumer, as a lifestyle/craft business. Laboratory breeders sell animals and rabbit-derived biologicals to research buyers — a steadier, higher-value channel. For rabbit, processing access, food-inspection status, cold-chain logistics, and customer density often matter more than farm size; the lack of mandatory federal meat inspection (see §7) caps large-retail access. A USDA-funded Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) project flags limited consumer demand and volatile feed costs as the main barriers to scaling — a producer-level signal, not an audited industry estimate.[24]

6. What drives demand

For mink, demand is downstream and mostly offshore. Finished fur sells into luxury apparel, with end-demand concentrated in China, Russia, and East Asia; global fashion cycles and cold-weather markets swing volumes hard. The U.S. is a small share of a global pelt market long dominated by Denmark, Poland and China, so American ranchers ride a world price they don't set. Two demand shocks compounded the cyclical downturn: (1) a wave of luxury brands going fur-free (Gucci, Prada, Versace, Armani and others) plus major department stores dropping fur — even as a few houses such as Fendi keep buying certified pelts; and (2) the Danish herd cull of ~17 million mink in 2020 during COVID, which scrambled global supply. Faux (synthetic) fur is a persistent substitute; certification and traceability (e.g. Furmark) are increasingly the price of access to the surviving luxury channel.[21]

For rabbit, demand is domestic and niche: specialty and ethnic cuisine, a small but health/sustainability-oriented protein following, fiber-arts hobbyists (Angora), and research/pet markets (including raw pet-food ingredients). Per-capita U.S. rabbit-meat consumption is very low and has not scaled; the growth case rests more on reliable inspected processing and distribution than on broad consumer conversion.[16][24]

7. Regulation

• No federal on-farm welfare standard for fur animals. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA) largely exempts animals raised for food and fiber, so mink and meat-rabbit husbandry is governed mainly by state cruelty statutes, not a national code. Operations that instead supply pets, research, exhibition, or certain transport channels can fall under AWA licensing.[11]
• Rabbit meat inspection. Rabbit is a non-amenable species: federal inspection is voluntary, fee-for-service by USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) under the Agricultural Marketing Act rather than mandatory under the Federal Meat/Poultry inspection acts; uninspected rabbit meat falls largely under FDA jurisdiction, especially interstate. This limits large-scale retail distribution.[19]
• Fur labeling. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Fur Products Labeling Act requires disclosure of the animal species, country of origin of imported fur, and treatments such as dyeing.[20]
• Fur sales bans (retail). California (AB 44) and Oregon (HB 2924) both prohibit the sale of new fur products, each effective January 1, 2023, alongside numerous city bans. These restrict the market for finished fur, not farming itself.[12]
• Fur farming bans. Unlike several European countries, no U.S. state has banned mink farming. A federal bill (the "Mink VIRUS Act") to ban mink farming on public-health grounds has been introduced repeatedly but not enacted; government buy-out proposals to compensate exiting farmers have also been floated.[13]
• Public-health / disease. Mink are uniquely susceptible to respiratory viruses. Denmark culled its entire herd over SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, U.S. mink farms in Utah had confirmed SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks, and H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks on European mink farms have raised mammal-to-mammal spillover concerns — the stated rationale behind federal ban efforts.[13][23] In rabbits, Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus (RHDV2) is a reportable disease driving biosecurity requirements.
• Data note. USDA discontinued the annual mink statistics survey in 2025, so the July 2025 report is effectively the last official production series — a real loss of transparency for anyone tracking the industry.[4]

For investors, regulation cuts two ways: it raises operating cost and shapes demand. A farm can be fully compliant yet still lose customers because retailers, designers, or consumers adopt fur-free policies.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The dominant dynamic on the fur side is secular contraction, not competition for share. Mink farm counts fell from 236 (2017) to 110 (2022); production is consolidating into fewer, larger, lower-cost ranches in Wisconsin and the West as marginal family operations exit at sub-break-even prices.[4][6][7] Supporting infrastructure has thinned in parallel: NAFA (Toronto) collapsed in 2019 and Kopenhagen Fur is winding down, leaving Finland's Saga Furs as the main surviving Western auction venue and shifting more of the world's pelt marketing toward China.[9][10]

Rabbit production remains fragmented — many tiny breeders plus a few processors — but shows selective channel consolidation (the 2025 Natural State Rabbit / Blue Ridge combination), not a broad public-company roll-up.[16] Across both segments, the most defensible economics tend to belong to channel owners — processors, auction/grading platforms, certified suppliers, specialized distributors — and to integrators that own feed prep, breeding, traceability, and buyer relationships, rather than farms competing only on animal volume.

9. Risks

• Terminal demand decline (fur): brand fur-free policies, retail sales bans, and shifting consumer attitudes point to a shrinking end-market — a demand problem that scale cannot fix.
• Commodity price volatility: auction prices have swung from ~$94 to ~$21 per pelt within a decade; below-cost years force exits.[4]
• Disease / biosecurity shock: SARS-CoV-2, H5N1, and RHDV2 can trigger mass culls, quarantine, and movement bans with little warning.[13][23]
• Regulatory / legislative tail-risk: state or federal farming bans (and buy-out schemes) could end mink ranching outright; sales bans keep spreading; labeling and inspection rules shape market access.[12][13]
• Input-cost risk: feed, labor, energy, veterinary care, housing, and processing can compress already-thin margins.
• Concentration / illiquidity: no public pure-play, few buyers, thinned marketing infrastructure, geographic concentration in a handful of states, and producers dependent on a limited set of processors or auction houses.
• Data / underwriting risk: private ownership, agricultural exclusions from business datasets, and the discontinued mink survey make the sector hard to benchmark.[4]
• Succession / execution risk: multi-generation family ownership preserves expertise but adds key-person, financing, and governance fragility.
• Rabbit-specific: thin margins, low consumer familiarity, and no mandatory inspection limiting retail scale.

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public route. For practical purposes there isn't a clean one. The closest listed proxy is Saga Furs Oyj (Helsinki: SAGCV) — a fur auction and marketing house, not a farmer, thinly traded and exposed to the same secular decline (though FY2023/24 rebounded on firmer auction prices and strong Chinese demand).[9] LVMH (MC) is only a diffuse downstream luxury-demand proxy via Fendi, and Canada Goose (GOOS) is a former-exposure name, not a fur investment.[21][22] No U.S. ticker or ETF gives targeted exposure to 112930. The right diligence questions here are supply volumes, auction prices, certification, customer concentration, geographic demand, working capital, and policy exposure — not generic agricultural multiples.

Private route. Direct ownership of a mink ranch is a capital-intensive, deeply cyclical bet with genuine regulatory and disease tail-risk in a declining market — a hard case to underwrite. Rabbit ventures (meat, Angora fiber, or lab/pet breeding) have low entry barriers but thin margins and small addressable demand; the steadier corners are laboratory supply and channel/processing infrastructure (processing, cold chain, grading, traceability, contract-grower platforms, or equipment/working-capital lending) rather than undifferentiated animal volume. Before committing, verify species and end market, customer contracts, realized prices, feed and labor costs, mortality, inspection status, animal-health protocols, permits, waste handling, insurance, customer concentration, succession, and exit liquidity.

Near-term drivers to watch: the trajectory of international auction prices and Chinese luxury demand; any H5N1 or SARS-CoV-2 outbreak on U.S. mink farms; the fate of federal ban/buy-out legislation and further state sales bans; and the continued drift of luxury brands to fur-free lines. On balance, the reported trend and the direction of policy point to continued secular decline for the fur side, with the rabbit side likely to persist as a stable-but-small niche whose incremental growth depends on reliable processing and distribution — a judgment, not a certainty, but one the data lean toward. Net assessment: interesting to understand, largely un-investable through public markets, and a difficult allocation privately.

---

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau / NAICS Association. "NAICS Code 112930 — Fur-Bearing Animal and Rabbit Production" (2022). https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?v=2022&code=112930
2. U.S. Census Bureau. "County Business Patterns — Methodology" (covers ~1,200 NAICS industries, excluding crop and animal production, NAICS 111 and 112). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
3. U.S. Small Business Administration. "Table of Small Business Size Standards" — NAICS 112930, $3.75 million average annual receipts (2023). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
4. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. "Mink" (released July 11, 2025; 2024 crop-year data; notes survey discontinuation). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/mink0725.pdf
5. Animal Wellness Action. "Mink fur farms continue dramatic decline… latest USDA annual survey" (historical mid-1960s peak of ~6,000 farms / 6.2 million pelts), 2023. https://animalwellnessaction.org/
6. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. "2022 Census of Agriculture — Other Animals and Animal Products, U.S. Data" (mink: 110 farms, 307,834 head inventory, 13 farms sold 7,560 live mink for $1.269 M; rabbits: 6,400 farms, 199,126 inventory, 3,058 farms sold 438,955 rabbits for $8.571 M). https://www.nass.usda.gov/agcensus/
7. Humane World for Animals (formerly Humane Society of the U.S.). "The number of US mink fur farms plummets…" (USDA Census of Agriculture: 236 farms in 2017, 110 in 2022), 2024. https://www.humaneworld.org/en/blog/us-mink-fur-farm-numbers-fall
8. Agricultural Marketing Resource Center (Iowa State University). "Rabbits" (2022 Census context; Angora "cottage industry"). https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/livestock-dairy-poultry/rabbits
9. Saga Furs Oyj. "Financial Bulletin FY2023/2024" and "Share and Shareholders" (HEL: SAGCV; FY revenue ~€41 M; auction house for mink, fox, finnraccoon; voting shares held by fur-breeder associations). https://www.sagafurs.com/our-company/investors/
10. CBC News. "Historic fur auction house granted creditor protection status" (North American Fur Auctions, 2019). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/north-american-fur-auctions-creditor-protection-1.5348510
11. Animal Legal & Historical Center, Michigan State University. "Fur Production and Fur Laws" (Animal Welfare Act scope for farm vs. research/pet/exhibition animals). https://www.animallaw.info/intro/fur-production-and-fur-laws
12. Humane World for Animals / Fur Free Alliance. "Fur bans" (California AB 44 and Oregon HB 2924 statewide retail fur-sales bans, both effective Jan 1, 2023; plus numerous city bans). https://www.furfreealliance.com/fur-bans/
13. Animal Welfare Institute. "Mink VIRUS Act" and H5N1 / SARS-CoV-2 spillover context (bill introduced, not enacted; buy-out proposals floated). https://awionline.org/legislation/mink-virus-act
14. Fur Commission USA. "About Mink Farming" (most U.S. mink farms described as multi-generation family operations). https://www.furcommission.com/about-1
15. Zimbal Mink. "History / About" (family-operated since 1954; 400,000+ mink; in-house feed, grading, marketing). https://zimbalmink.com/about/
16. Natural State Rabbit / Blue Ridge Rabbit Meat Co. (company farms + independent growers; processing consolidated at Natural State's Arkansas facility, Aug 2025). https://nsrabbitmeat.com/ and https://www.blueridgerabbitmeatco.com/our-story.html
17. Arkansas Economic Development Commission. "Rogers Biotech Company Pel-Freez Expands Operations" (Pel-Freez Biologicals; acquired by a private investment group in 2020). https://www.arkansasedc.com/news-events/newsroom/detail/2021/10/13/
18. American Mink Exchange. "About Our Company" (family-owned mink auction and trading, Tax family). https://www.americanminkexchange.com/about-us
19. USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. "Rabbit From Farm to Table" (rabbit a non-amenable species; voluntary fee-for-service inspection; otherwise FDA jurisdiction). https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation/meat-fish/rabbit-farm-table
20. Federal Trade Commission. "How to Comply with the Fur Products Labeling Act" (species, origin, and treatment disclosure). https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/how-comply-fur-products-labeling-act
21. Fendi / LVMH. "Leather & Fur" responsible-sourcing materials (fur described as central to Fendi; Furmark-certified pelts; not separately reported in LVMH results). https://www.fendi.com/sustainability/en/responsible-product/leather-fur
22. Canada Goose Holdings Inc. Annual Report on Form 20-F, FY2025 (ended fur purchasing in 2021 and fur manufacturing by end-2022; former coyote-fur trim). https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001690511
23. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "SARS-CoV-2 Exposure in Escaped Mink, Utah, USA" (confirmed U.S. mink-farm outbreaks). https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/3/20-4444_article
24. USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE). "Developing a Sustainable Rabbit Enterprise…" (identifies limited demand and volatile feed costs as scaling barriers). https://projects.sare.org/