Name The
Mobile Matanza
Hometown Taos, New Mexico
Measurements 36 feet long by 13 feet,
6 inches tall
Items on her wish
list Gloves, hook-eye sharpener, meat band saw
blades, meat grinder plates, three-way oilstone, platters, long
butchering aprons, butchering supplies and knives, brushes and
scrapers.
She’s sleek, full-figured and
gleaming white, though not exactly sexy. From nose to rear, she
measures a firm 36 feet, all polished metal on the inside. She can
accommodate 10 at a time — 10 animal units, that is —
and she has her own inspection table and, toward the back, an offal
chute.
She’s the Mobile Matanza — a
rolling livestock butchering unit and the pride of Taos County. The
Taos County of skiing Texans and sticker-shock real estate is still
the Taos County of family ranchers, many of whom eke out a living
on fewer than 100 acres, running their cattle on northern New
Mexico’s forests in the summer. Most of them then send their
livestock off to feedlots and slaughterhouses in other states,
where the animals are subsumed into the mass meat market. But the
Taos County Economic Development Corporation would like to change
all that.
With funding from the state, the
corporation’s directors, Pati Martinson and Terrie Bad Hand,
have found a way to bring the butcher to the ranchers and perhaps
the meat to expanding local markets. Beginning this spring, cattle,
pigs, lambs, goats, even bison, will trot up the ramp leading into
the back of the Mobile Matanza, where they’ll be met by Lee
Knox, coordinator of the program.
Grinning boyishly, Knox
shows off the Mobile Matanza. He looks the part of a truck
driver/butcher, with a black cowboy hat that pushes him well beyond
six feet tall, and a wide girth that indicates he’s capable
of wrestling just about any animal reluctant to go to slaughter.
Once Knox has killed and butchered his four-legged
client, an on-site state inspector examines its organs and the
entrails go out the offal chute. From there, the meat is placed in
a room toward the front of the trailer, the doors are closed, and
the next animal is led into the trailer.
It’s a
completely self-contained unit. Knox walks along the passenger side
of the trailer and shows off another room toward the cab of the
truck. Inside is a 300-gallon water tank, a 10-gallon acid wash
tank (apple cider vinegar, he explains), a diesel generator and its
50-gallon fuel cell.
“When we come out to the ranch, the
rancher doesn’t have to provide anything, he doesn’t
have to have water, electricity,” says Knox. “I have my own
electricity, own power wash pump, refrigeration unit, hot water
heater — and the diesel generator is sound-enclosed, so
it’s real quiet.”
Hopping down from the
driver’s side of an International 9200 truck, Michael, a
rancher from Alcalde dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, yells
out: “That’s one fancy rig!”
Michael peppers Knox
with questions as he tries to figure out if the program could work
for him and his herd of 25 mother cows: “What have you guys thought
about the waste?” (Knox favors composting it or working with a
biodiesel producer in Colorado). “Have you figured out prices
already?” (Knox is still comparison-shopping, then factoring in the
cost of gasoline.) “Are you going to have a centralized place to
store (the meat)?” (The development council is building a
cut-and-wrap facility on its grounds and has ordered an enormous
Polar King freezer.)
“Okaaaaay,” says Michael.
“That’s what I was worried about, that’s what’s
going to make this ideal.”
Another curious rancher,
Erminio Martinez, is clearly impressed by the Matanza. His family
has been ranching for generations — today, he runs cattle and
sheep in Colorado’s San Luis Valley and near Arroyo Seco,
N.M. — and it’s hard, he says, for rural ranchers to
travel 60 to 100 miles to bring their animals to butcher, then to
process and store the meat. “To have local access to the matanza,”
he says, “well, that’s not just good for the private
individuals, it’s good for the community.”
The author writes from Albuquerque, New
Mexico.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Have knives and hooks, will travel.
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