Denmark’s mink industry ends after 90 years of booms and crises
Friday 23rd October 2026 on 21:45 in
Denmark
Denmark’s mink industry, once a global export force, has reached its end after nine decades marked by rapid growth, market crises and controversy, DR reports.
More than 15 million mink were killed after the government ordered all mink in Denmark to be culled. Hans Jørgen and Anne Stenbek, a farming couple, killed their last animals by the government’s deadline, with help from four other local mink farmers. Together they culled 9,000 animals.
The industry began in the 1930s, as falling commodity prices and rising unemployment led farmers to look for new sources of income. Cheap feed made from fish-industry waste helped mink farming take hold near ports. Denmark’s mild winters and moderate summers also suited the animals’ fur production.
By 1960, Denmark had 3,000 fur farms, according to the Danish Fur Breeders Association. Mink overtook foxes and swamp beavers from the 1950s, and Denmark was among the world’s top three mink exporters in the 1970s, says Henning Otte Hansen, a senior adviser at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute of Food and Resource Economics.
Demand from Asia rose sharply in the early 1980s, with much of the supply coming from Denmark. But global fur production outstripped demand by the end of the decade, triggering a serious crisis. Many Danish mink farmers left the industry in the 1990s, before demand began to recover in the middle of the decade.
As animal welfare groups protested fur farming and several European countries moved towards ending it, Danish producers took a different course. In 2004, they left the Nordic marketing partnership Saga Furs and established Kopenhagen Fur, creating a Danish auction house and brand in Glostrup.
Demand surged after the financial crisis, partly as Chinese consumers had more money to spend. Kopenhagen Fur reported turnover of 968 million kroner and a profit of 432 million kroner in 2013.
Across its history, the industry was exposed to sharp swings in the global market, Hansen says. Its fate was ultimately sealed after a government announcement in 2020, with the mass culling and the compensation paid to farmers becoming defining parts of its final chapter.