July - sustainable skin
Written for and originally published by Homes & Gardens
In recent years, the cow has become controversial. Can this column, dedicated to sustainable living, really propose leather? In the last year, I’ve developed ambitions to work with skin from biodiversity-boosting beasts. For a short while I switched to a vegan diet, influenced by studies reporting ruminant meat heats the earth. With research, I found it was not so much the cow, more the ‘how’. I still mostly eat plants, but now buy some beef from small, British, wild-pasture producers.
How ruminants live and eat determines their ecological impact. Cattle were once wild animals, fitting into natural systems like the carbon cycle or wildflower seed distribution, before domestication. Take any natural thing out of its ecological cycle, intensify it, and it will cause imbalance. Feeding cattle soy and grain while they stand in their hundreds on a metal grid, dung draining into an open slurry pit, upsets natural balances like greenhouse gases. Much of the cattle in the world is reared in this ecologically damaging way and I don’t support it by consuming its products. However, let cattle browse their natural fodder; grass, brambles, trees and wildflowers, while allowing their dung to feed soil, and you have a creature that’s very close to its right place in the evolved ecosystem, with land that absorbs carbon through grazing.
The Horned Beef Company rear hardy cattle in this way on tenanted Cumbrian upland scrub, and record the wildlife returning to the land they farm. With my first order of their fabulous beef, I explored the opportunity to work with leather from the same cows. They explained that they didn’t have a route to a tannery but that I was welcome to take some skins and try.
Chatting with the renowned leatherworker Bill Amberg, my enthusiasm for leather was compounded. We all know it as a strong and durable material, but I hadn’t appreciated its repairability. Bill is currently restoring Edwardian car seats and argues leather is an unrivalled material for its potential in a circular economy.
I phoned a tannery to ask if they would tan Horned Beef skins. My request was declined, which is fair enough; small businesses representing the last of industries undercut by cheap imports operate on such slim margins that odd requests are often unaffordable risks. They generously took the time to explain their industry. Let alone bramble-scratched wild cattle, they can’t even accept organic skins due to the blemishes from parasites like ringworm, making the hides unsellable to leatherworkers. These natural parasites are chemically eradicated in non-organic systems, so consumers expecting perfect hides inadvertently keep organic leather away from tanneries. I hung up thinking, surely blemishes are equivalent to a knot in a tree, who wouldn’t want that?
Overhearing my call in the studio, my colleague Isaac mentioned a company using waste goat skins. Billy Tannery is an ambitious micro-tannery, making beautiful leather goods from the by-product of the goat milk industry. They are the only people in the country using this waste skin, and it’s only made possible by their willingness and passion, to do it themselves. They make beautiful bags, shoes and accessories from skins otherwise destined for landfill.
With a crush on both Jack and Rory from Billy Tannery and Bekka and David from The Horned Beef Company, I’m really excited to be collaborating with both companies to make leather homeware working with wild beef skin in a micro-tannery. We don’t yet know what we’ll make, but it will have as many blemishes as our dining tables have knots.
Leather is not just a co-product that’s nice to use, with the right farmers, tanners and consumer attitude it can be a regenerative and biodiversity-boosting material, sequestering carbon and part of a waste-avoiding circular economy. Animal skin has been a part of our material culture for millennia and can continue to be if we produce it correctly. As with beef, we should scrutinise and avoid intensive production, but I feel hugely energised by the problem-solving pioneers showing how this wonderful material can come from natural cycles again.