For over 65 years, Bernice and Frank Monteleone have been raising minks on their farm in Elgin. The couple bought their first mink in 1959 — a red female who was pregnant at the time. She quickly ...

NEW HOLSTEIN, Wis. — Next to their white clapboard house on a rural road here, in long rows of cages set beneath the roofs of seven open-air sheds, Virginia and Gary Bonlander are raising 5,000 minks.

The couple traded those kits for minks from a neighboring farmer and began to breed them. That one female mink led the family to raise around 30,000 minks at the height of their production. In turn, ...