Do you skin your deer or let processor do it? What are uses for hides and are they "worth" anything? Rules say legal to sell, so what is one worth and where to to sell them? What do you do to preserve them for sell after skinning? Surely the processors have an outlet for them, so does a processor charge more/less for a skinned deer? Lots of questions just to open discussion. I'm trying to understand the pros and cons of whether worth doing myself or no. Thanks.

Rendering plants, landfield or coyotes get most of them.

hide aint worth nothing far as i know . my processor buries them in a hole .

buck capes might be worth some thing to a taxidermist . i have swapped the cape for a cheap plaque mount for the antlers .

I have a game pole. I gut , skin , and quarter my deer and the take them to the processor. My cost drops by 1/2 over letting them process the whole deer. But I also have kids and grandkids who kill deer also. A friend takes most of the hides and tans them for his own projects.

Got a buddy who ties lures. He collects hair and feathers from various critters.

I see lots of processors throw some type of white dust on the hydes and lay them flat on a pallet... One on top of another... Sometimes they will have them stacked head high 2 or 3 pallets full of them.... Idk what they use them for but they're probably selling them to someone

borax , i bet

A buddy of mine own a processing business and he sells the hides for $20 a piece to a guy that buys them by the trailer load. His business then sells them to china. He skins the deer and throws them in a salting room and when its full he calls the guy up.

Some processors collect hides and a guy comes around to send them to China, they make shoes, such as Niki

make you some moccasins

I have had them tanned with the hair on and made rugs. I have a buddy that has gloves, pants and shirts. He has some that were just salted and dried that are used for rugs in his tee pee. I also have a gun sleeve for my hawken.

You should learn how to brain tan hides. You could make you a buckskin jacket or a pair of pants.

Interesting replies. What I have learned is that I don't really need to skin my deer and should let the processor mess with it.

Follow up for anybody that may care: I talked to a business today that can prepare the hides as "fur skin", "leather", or even "parchment". He said I would need to salt it with non-iodized salt a couple times to dry it, then overnight it to him. This business is in New York. About $65 plus shipping. Might make an interesting art piece if you have an artist in the family.
Thanks for the input and responses.

My sister is an excellent Hunter and she and her husband are into Rendevous camping and flintlock shooting. She took some skins of deer she shot and brain tanned them. She then sewed a beautiful dress with them. She also collected hundreds of porcupine quills of varied colors and wove them together to make a gorgeous purse.

When i used to do it we bought them in the green for .50 cents-$1. Salted maybe 1.50-2.00. They averaged $5 dollars a hide the last year i sold them. There is a ton of work in fleshing a hide out to be salted. On a big scale when you are doing mimimum 5,000 hides a year its worth selling them but other than that id just toss them with everything else. Oh yeah the hooves are worth a nickel a piece