Update on tannins: stewardship is complex
When we started Stewards Provisions and Tannery, we chose to center stewardship in all our practices. Stewardship requires continual examination, flexibility, and clear eyed focus on the needs of our communities. We want to update you, our clients and customers on our evolving approach to an important part of tannery stewardship: tannins.
Summary: starting in 2024, we will primarily be using mimosa tannin for sheepskin tanning services. We plan to offer local sumac tanning as an option for an additional fee when locally harvested supplies are available. Read on for more of the back story.
One of our long-term tannery goals is to see domestic (Midwest USA) production of tannins become economically viable for the first time in nearly a century. Currently that is not the case and pretty much all production tanneries in the USA import their tannin, including yours truly. Each region has different potential or historical tannin sources. In our part of the Midwest, sumac (leaf), chestnut (wood) and willow (bark) may be the best options. For sheepskins, we love the results from sumac which yields near white soft and supple leather with only slight color imparted to the wool. Sumac leaf is also a sustainable tannin source, as they can be harvested from the native bushes each year with minimal impact to the health of the bush. We are also exploring regional sources of chestnut wood for tanning sheep and deer leather.
However, another primary tannery goal is to provide an economically viable alternative to throwing the thousands of sheepskins that are harvested for meat into the landfill. We want farmers and meat processors to be compensated for the value that sheepskins can bring to our communities. In order to do this, we recognize that keeping our costs as low as possible will increase the breadth of skins that can become economically viable. In turn, this brings value to a wider range of shepherds and a wider cross section of our communities that can be provisioned with lambskins and sheep leather goods.
We have wrestled with these two competing stewardship goals over our first year of operation. In this second year, we have decided that we want to prioritize efficiency in our primary service line, while continuing to pursue the dream of local harvested tannin in our own farm’s products and wholesale items that we market. When local supplies are available, we will offer these as an additional fee to the standard tanning. To that end, for our “tanning as a service” for local shepherds, we will be defaulting to mimosa tanning in 2024. It is important to note that we still love the results we get from mimosa tanning, and pretty much all of the other veg tan natural sheepskin tanneries in the USA use mimosa due to its exceptional qualities and ready availability as an import.
