Couple thoughts. I use to hangout with an old saddle maker. He was in his 80's some 35 years past. Been making saddles since he was 12. He didn't draw out any tooling patterns. He just started in with his swivel knife. I was always dumbfounded by this, as I would sure throw away a LOT of leather doing that. He said he did when he was learning as a young man but and this was the deal, a side of saddle skirting when he was learning as a youngster was a quarter, yep 25 cents! So his mentors just had him start carving, if he screwed up just toss it and start over. Its just a dead cow. I can remember riding with my grandfather in his pick up across the ranch as a young boy. Gasoline had just soared to 30 cents a gallon, it was all the talk on the radio. He told me then when gas had hit a nickel a gallon he didn't know how he was gonna continue to run his ranch and haying fields, just couldn't do it at a nickel a gallon for fuel. Point of all this is we will look back someday and remember now as the good old days, when leather was cheap. I think Paul hit it on the head. It is a perfect storm but I think what is causing the rising prices is capacity at the tanneries and global demand, not so much the cow herd and drought.
