Eric Rasband leads what you might call a simple life: He is the 27-year-old manager of Rasband Dairy in Belen.
“There’s no days off over here. Just work,” he said. “If you don’t have a good work ethic, this would be a good place to get one. It’s nothing but work over here. … This job kinda teaches you that hard work does pay off, you know?”
As a kid, Rasband grew up around cows, helping his father work on the farm as soon as he was able. When he got old enough, he took a more active role at Rasband.
“I mean, I was helpin’ (my dad) out before then, but that’s when I kinda got serious about it,” he said. “This is kinda the way I was brought up. It kinda grew onto me, I guess. I didn’t really care to do anything else.”
Rasband graduated high school and started college, but didn’t graduate because he already had a job on the farm to take care of.
“I tried it out, but there was so much work to do here,” he said. “This is pretty much hands-on training — nothin’ school could teach you anyway.”
Rasband works eight to 10 hours a day, seven days a week. As the farm’s manager, he has to make sure every piece of the operation runs smoothly at all times and that his employees have what they need.
“If anybody has any problems, they usually come to me, and I try to get them fixed up,” he said.
The farm has 250-300 cows at any given time, with about 120 of them producing milk, around 1,200 gallons a day in total. The farm sells milk to smaller distributors, such as the La Montañita Co-op, which has a store at UNM.
Rasband Dairy has an advantage over larger operations because it doesn’t give drugs to its cows to make them produce more milk, Rasband said.
“Everything’s organic over here,” he said. “We’re not givin’ the cows anything to make ‘em produce more, other than good feed.”
Unlike many larger producers, which routinely give antibiotics to all of their cows to counter the negative effects of the unhealthy feed they’re given, Rasband Dairy separates cows that have to be given antibiotics and doesn’t sell their milk to the public, Rasband said.
“It’s all on a vacuum system,” he said. “If you have a sick cow, you have to pump it into a separate container. It still runs on a vacuum. … We hardly have any sick. We get maybe a sick cow every other month.”
All the cows are milked by machine, which means every cow can be milked twice a day, at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m., by a team of only two to three people.
“Basically you bring your cows in, do a prewash on all your lines in here, clean out your vacuum pumps, and then the machines pretty much do it themselves,” Rasband said.
The farm was started in the 1950s by Rasband’s grandfather, who passed it on to his father and then to him. When it began, it only had about 20 cows.
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The Rasband family also owns about 100 acres of farmland in Belen and 200 acres in Albuquerque, so they can grow a lot of their own feed, Rasband said.
In the rare moments when he has free time, Rasband likes to travel with his daughter, Kerra, who is 5 years old.
“We like to go to Disney World,” he said. “Every free chance we got, we take off. Summertime, we go to the lake.”
Rasband said he likes working on the farm because it is, in some ways, a peaceful job.
“I guess that it’s just, like, nobody breathin’ down my neck, nobody botherin’ me,” he said. “It’s real nice. It’s quiet over here.”
