Growing the pipeline of livestock veterinarians
By MWI Animal Health
The animals that feed the world are facing a crisis. There are not enough qualified veterinarians to care for them. The USDA currently recognizes veterinarian shortages in a record-high 237 rural areas in 47 different states.1
“Production animal medicine is hard,” admits Brad Williams, DVM MBA, Senior Director, Technical Services-Production Animal at MWI Animal Health. And Williams understands this firsthand. Before joining the team at MWI, he worked as a large animal practitioner, and later, as a veterinary-industry consultant.
Not everyone cares for the rural lifestyle. Younger veterinarians may avoid choosing these jobs in remote areas because they prefer to live closer to family and friends, where they’d have more support.
Hiring qualified veterinary technicians is another hurdle for food animal practices. Other industries can tempt new graduates with higher starting salaries. Clinton J. Roof, DVM, MS, MPH, Assistant Professor of Dairy Medicine and Surgery at Texas Tech University’s School of Veterinary Medicine says, “I look at veterinary assistants and veterinary technicians as the nurses of the animal world, and they don't get paid near enough for the work and the time that they put in.”
Drawing more students to the field
There are multiple reasons behind the shortage of production animal veterinary professionals—and multiple solutions. Start with the pipeline—encourage more veterinary students to pursue food animal practice after graduation.
Considering that currently, only 3-4 percent of veterinary school graduates are choosing food animal practice, there is clearly a need for education on the potential of food animal medicine and the opportunities available with a focus on production animals, and interventions at the university level.3
Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa is looking to solve the problem even before veterinary school. Experience with animals or veterinary work is a prerequisite for veterinary school admissions. Iowa State’s Food Animal Summer Experience makes it financially easier to get that experience through its structured program. The program covers the room and board of eight students interested in applying to the College of Veterinary Medicine. The students spend time working on the department’s teaching farms, better understanding the responsibilities of production animal veterinarians, while completing their pre-application hours. The program hopes it can help more students of color and more students from different socio-economic backgrounds consider veterinary school as a viable option.
“How do we get students from the area, keep them in the area, train them in the area with hands-on experience, not a large teaching hospital, but actually working with large animals?” asks Williams.
Until recently, Texas A&M University in College Station was the only veterinary school in Texas. However, the main campus was 550 miles from Amarillo, where most feedyards, large dairies, and commercial swine operations are. Such distance made it challenging for students to gain additional experiences.
The school introduced the two-by-two program, where students spend the first two years at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas and the second two years at A&M. Students can elect to return to Amarillo or Canyon for their 4th year clinicals. Since West Texas A&M is in the Panhandle, less than 20 miles from Amarillo, students have convenient exposure to livestock and rural veterinary medicine.
According to the University, the two-by-two approach helps with the goal to grow the number of large animal vets working in the Texas Panhandle region, while also supporting regional youth with a desire to have a veterinary career.
Authentic mentorships
Understanding the need for more educational opportunities—and more veterinarians—Texas Tech University in Amarillo created its veterinary school—now the second in the state. Its first class was admitted in 2021.
One distinction for the program is its distributive model that allows for experience in private practices. Instead of spending a clinical year in a teaching hospital, students rotate through rural practices in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, getting real-world experiences.
There’s an adage, “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Current educational models don’t always expose students to all the different ways they can practice veterinary medicine. Roof remarks, “I can't tell you how many students I have met over the years. They'll drive by a dairy, drive by a feedlot, a field full of sheep, but have no idea what is going on there.”
Even before the 4th clinical year, Texas Tech invites industry professionals to speak to students and bring them on field trips to production animal operations. Experts are not limited to veterinarians, but also include feedlot managers, dairy operators, owners, swine raisers, poultry producers, etc.
This creates the opportunity to compare and contrast different work environments and, importantly, how the producers manage their animals. Actually seeing ill or high-risk animals and how the producer and the practicing veterinarian collaborate for care opens new possibilities for students. Had they not listened to the speakers or visited the facilities, a career in production animal medicine might never have crossed their minds.
Students have said things like “I feel more comfortable because I understand what's going on in the dairy or “I understand what's going on in the feedlot.” During their 4th year, they might be more inclined to seek out opportunities that give them more exposure to those settings.
Fostering student confidence
Classroom lessons and even hands-on labs don’t necessarily reflect real-world experiences. Williams remembers as a veterinary student, he participated in a cow C-section with two board-certified surgeons, an anesthesiologist, and two or three veterinary technicians in the sterile environment of the teaching hospital. Fast forward to the first one he had to complete in practice, and it was just him, squeezed into a shoot at the feed yard. These 180-degree shifts are not uncommon moving from academia to practical work. So, anything that exposes students to the realities of the work, and the nuances between species, is helpful.
The goal is to graduate students who will be confident walking into a clinic—or a dairy, a feed yard, a poultry business--and performing any task for the health of the animal.
Another university with a unique approach to that goal is Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In the veterinary school’s integrated beef-cattle program, current students work side-by-side with practicing veterinarians to better understand the herd health, nutrition, reproductive medicine, forage management, and other needs of cattle producers. The students grow their networks and gain a stronger understanding of practice management.
One of the essential lessons from partnering with the DVMs is the business of being a veterinarian. The business side of running a practice is not always a part of the veterinary school curriculum. Sometimes, that can leave new graduate adrift when they enter practice. “You need to understand the medicine and you need to understand the business and be able to put those two together,” says Williams.
Strengthening relationships
The relationships between producers and their veterinarians are long-lasting. When a veterinarian wants to retire, they need an exit strategy. To lay the groundwork, they need to hire associate veterinarians, who get to know the customers, and ideally, take over the business when the time comes. Enticing young veterinarians to put down roots in the area, and eventually take over a practice or open their own, is a challenge. High student debt can detract from the pursuit of practice ownership, providing a motivating factor for debt relief.
More than 80 percent of veterinarians graduate with educational debt that averages more than $185,000.4 Addressing that debt is a crucial factor in growing the pipeline of food animal veterinarians. The Rural Veterinary Workforce Act is a piece of legislation pending in Congress that aims to extend the reach of the Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program (VMLRP). If passed, it would help more food animal and public health veterinarians relocate to rural areas facing veterinary shortages. This act promises to pay off $75,000 of each veterinarian’s student loans if they practice in a designated shortage area for three years.5
Veterinarians matter
“Our population is growing exponentially, and we must feed those people. And in order to feed them, we need production animals,” explains Roof.
Even if we grow the size of food animal operations and enter more animals into the food chain, it’s not enough if there aren’t qualified veterinarians to provide medical care for them. Ill animals may not receive the proper treatment. Inadequate disease management carries risks to food production capacity, which has a run-off effect on people’s well-being.
Producers need to access care at a reasonable time. If it’s an emergency, it's not feasible to wait four or five hours. Veterinarians educate producers on best practices for animal health, like prescription management and antibiotic use. How can they continue to do that if there are no veterinarians?
Medication must be under a veterinary feed directive, regardless of bovine or poultry or swine. Additionally, regulations from the USDA mandate seeing a veterinarian before getting antibiotics from a feed store, necessitating the veterinarian-producer relationship even more.
Food animal veterinarians are an integral part of the OneHealth concept, the interconnectedness between human health, animal health, and the health of our environment. Besides sustaining animals' welfare, food animal veterinarians ensure the safety of the food we eat. They also ensure fiscal stability throughout the food supply chain by diagnosing, treating, and preventing potentially catastrophic emerging and zoonotic diseases.
“We have to ensure that our animals get the care they need so we can continue to safely and humanely produce what’s needed to feed the world,” says Williams.
