By Sterry Butcher | Photographs by Nick Simonite
Brings a Slaughterhouse Back to the Big Bend Small-town locker plants, lifelines for rural Texans for generations, have vanished from parts of the state. Christy Miller’s company is an exception.
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black Corriente steer looks around the unfamiliar holding pen and gives his tipped horns a shake. Christy Miller, the owner of Marfa Meats, watches from outside the pen, holding a coffee cup. Her brown hair is pulled into a messy bun, and she wears an oversized cardigan and leggings. The steer’s owner, in his Carhartt coat, clanks closed the livestock trailer’s gate. Miller’s Australian shepherd barks rhythmically from a yard nearby. The Corriente eyes Reine Conrad, Miller’s slaughter manager, who stands in the pen and holds a flag of blue fabric affixed to a rod. Conrad flaps the flag at the steer, urging it into a smaller enclosure with a scale on the ground. A tattoo of a butcher’s pork diagram peeks out from the sleeve of her New Zealand Rugby shirt. “Shh, shh,” she tells the steer as she waggles the flag. “Hey, hey. Oy. Hey, hey.” The steer considers her. He considers the enclosure in front of him. There is no hurry. He steps forward, onto the scale: 754 pounds. 34
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Miller converses briefly with the steer’s owner. “He’s gonna keep all the offal,” Miller calls to Conrad. “Everything?” Conrad asks. “You want the head whole, or just tongue and cheeks?” “Tongue and cheeks. I was gonna see if there’s a way to keep that skull and horns, maybe,” he says. “Y’all ever do that?” “I can give you the entire head back and strip off all the usable meat for you,” she says. “Yeah. That’d be great.” The owner rumbles off in his diesel truck. The two women nudge the Corriente through a set of pens until he walks up a ramp and into a modular building, where the door slides shut behind him. He occupies a chute facing Conrad. She holds a captive bolt gun, and a long-bladed knife hangs from her hip. She takes a moment to rub his woolly forehead. The steer is quiet, and his eyes show no alarm; his end is swift
and adroitly executed. His blood as it leaves his body steams in the refrigerated air. Miller opened Marfa Meats in the summer of 2021. It was the first livestock slaughter and processing plant, other than a teaching facility at Sul Ross State University, to operate in the Big Bend in decades. Though she is now steeped in the art and business of butchering, Miller, who is 47, has little background in agriculture. She grew up in Indiana and attended Indiana University, earned an MBA at the University of Oxford, and spent 25 years as a financial software consultant based in Denver. “I love projectbased work—the definitive start and end,” she explains. “You have a baby for nine to sixteen months, and then you give it away.” What that work lacked, however, was a human element. “Being able to connect with people is so critical to my satisfaction,” she says. Between consulting contracts, Miller traveled. A road trip in 2015 took her through Marfa, and the town charmed her so much that she began living there for part of the year. By 2017 she was spending
