On a farm in Dumfries and Galloway, Kylie McConnell is trying to answer a question most of the fashion industry would rather ignore: where does leather actually come from, and what if the person who raised the animal was also the one who worked its hide? An organic beef farmer, she is building what she calls a circular farm-to-fashion economy, using the leather from her own cattle.
Closing a Loop the Industry Severed
Modern leather supply chains are long, opaque, and geographically scattered. An animal raised in one place may be slaughtered in another and its hide tanned continents away, stripped of any connection to its origin. McConnell's project is a deliberate reversal, keeping the entire arc, from field to finished good, within a single farm's control.
The idea is deceptively radical. By using hides from her own cattle, she treats leather not as a commodity divorced from its source but as a byproduct of a known animal with a known life. It is traceability taken to its logical extreme, where the farmer and the maker are the same person.
What a Circular Economy Looks Like on a Farm
McConnell's vision, supported by a bursary funding leather skills courses and training, rests on a few interlocking principles.
- Full traceability: leather sourced from a single, known herd raised on the farm.
- Waste reduction: using hides that might otherwise be discarded or sold off cheaply.
- Value retention: keeping the economic value of the animal on the farm.
- Skills acquisition: learning tanning and leatherwork to complete the chain herself.
Organic Ethics Meet Craft Ambition
McConnell already farms organic beef, a practice built on standards of animal welfare and environmental care. Extending that ethic into leather is a natural, if demanding, next step. It insists that if an animal is raised responsibly, its hide deserves the same respect rather than disappearing into an anonymous global market.
Achieving this requires her to master an entirely new discipline. Farming and leatherwork are separate crafts, and bridging them means acquiring the skills of a tanner and maker from scratch. The bursary that funds her training is what makes the leap feasible, turning an aspiration into a curriculum.
A Small Farm With a Large Idea
What makes McConnell's project resonate is how neatly it answers several anxieties at once. Consumers increasingly want to know where their goods come from. Sustainability advocates want less waste. Craft revivalists want more human hands in the making of things. A farmer who raises cattle, then tans and crafts their hides, satisfies all three.
She is unlikely to disrupt the global leather trade single-handedly. But her farm functions as a proof of concept, a demonstration that the loop can, in fact, be closed. In an economy built on separating production from consumption, the sight of someone raising, honoring, and fully using an animal within a single circular system feels less like nostalgia and more like a preview of a more accountable way to make things.
From one Scottish herd, McConnell is quietly rebuilding a connection the industry spent a century dismantling, one hide at a time.