"Everyone knows the veterinarians."
Avery Mayberry grew up in rural Northeast Nebraska where livestock is a large part of the economy: “there’s a lot of feedlots, a lot of swine operations,” she said. And around town, “everyone knows the veterinarians.”
“I ride around with them and when we go into a store or a gas station, everybody knows them.” For Mayberry, that instant recognition is evidence of how their work is essential to the “community, and to giving back, and to supporting the farmers and the ranchers, and the people who rely on these animals for their incomes, their way of life.”
That position of respect and belonging was an essential piece of Mayberry’s nearly life-long desire to become a large-animal veterinarian herself. She is now a junior in the pre-veterinary program at Northwest Missouri State University and sent out applications to vet schools this winter.
Many of her classmates in the animal science program at Northwest, which has a strong school of agriculture, are similarly interested in working as large-animal veterinarians, but they are increasingly the exception.
Nationwide, fewer veterinary students are pursuing a career serving the country’s livestock industry, and, each year, the demand for graduates interested in working in large animal medicine outpaces the number who choose to specialize in the area.
According to Dan Grooms, Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University “it’s not just a problem in Missouri or Iowa, it’s a problem across the United States. The issue is a shortage of veterinarians in rural America, especially a shortage of veterinarians working to support the livestock industry in those rural communities,” he said.
Co-evolving industries
One factor driving the shortage is a simple financial issue. Urban and suburban clinics typically offer a higher wage to debt-burdened graduates, and, with only 33 accredited veterinary colleges in the country, and even fewer with a strong agricultural focus, there is a limited supply of individuals entering the profession.
But transitions in the livestock industry itself are also changing animal medicine. As the industry consolidates, many livestock veterinarians are now employed directly by corporate farms.
“There are veterinarians who work for a [farm] system,” Grooms said, “so they are working up and down the system. That’s prevalent in the swine and poultry [industries].”
Similarly, the dairy industry has seen significant consolidation in the past decades. Between 2002 and 2019, the number of licensed dairy farms in the United States decreased by more than half, and most milk is now produced on farms with over 1,000 cows.
“The role that a veterinarian has in those large dairies is much different than their role, traditionally, in a small dairy,” Grooms said, “so we are having to educate our students on how to interact with those large dairy farms, and those poultry systems and swine systems, as well.”
The livestock veterinarians of today might be analyzing fertility data to increase a herd’s productivity, pursuing research into new animal medical technology, or even, according to Grooms, performing telemedicine visits with farmers and their animals from an off-site location.
Amidst these shifts, the image of the country veterinarian bumping along dirt roads to birth a cow or tend to a wounded farm dog is increasingly rare.
Gerald Myers, known to his clients as "Doc," still fits that image. He graduated from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Missouri in the 1960s and moved to Pickering where he started a mixed animal practice on a crest of prairie 10 miles south of the Iowa border. For the past 50 years, he’s operated out of a three-room clinic dug into a hillside at the back edge of a barnyard.
“When I started the practice everyone up and down the road, every quarter or half a mile had 30 cows, 20 sows, a milk cow and, you know, that’s how they subsisted,” he said, speaking between appointments on a recent Saturday morning.
Today, agriculture in Northwest Missouri “is a different deal. You get the big cattle herds, and the cattle backgrounders, and no pigs, no dairy,” he said.
The declining number of farms has led to fewer young people like Mayberry, who says her upbringing around animals determined her professional path.
“If you didn’t grow up on a farm,” she added, “it’s tough to learn how to behave around cows. You have to learn how to act. That’s part of the reason we don’t see as many large animal vets, because something like 1% of the population are farmers now. There are not a lot of kids who grow up with the same opportunities [to pursue agriculture] that I’ve had.”
A challenging path
Regardless of specialty, pursuing veterinary medicine takes grit. Programs are selective and costly to attend. Mayberry and her classmates can spend hundreds of dollars on application fees at different schools, “and they might not even look twice at your application,” she said.
A junior in the pre-veterinary science program at Northwest from Horton, Kansas, Carley Hammersmith, spoke of similar challenges.
“You hear these discouragements even from other vets, who will say ‘don’t do it, it’s not worth it.’”
“So," Hammersmith added, “it’s hard to stay true to what I want to do, but, in the long run, I know it will be worth it.”
Those who graduate and decide to pursue large animal practice face challenging working conditions: tending to animals outdoors in all weather, picking up cows’ feet, birthing calves, staying on-call for farmers through weekends, nights, and holidays.
These conditions are another challenge for the industry. “What I often see is new graduates take a job, and they don’t get good mentorship, and they get burnt out, they get dissatisfied with their job, and then they leave food-animal medicine, maybe they leave the profession. And certainly, that’s very discouraging," said Grooms.
Attrition is a challenge in many different professions, Grooms added, and he says it can be overcome by connecting graduates with supportive clinics.
“I always encourage students, when they’re looking for jobs, to look for opportunities with growth potential and seek a practice where they can get good mentorship.”
Mentorship to move forward
On a similar note, Grooms said the shortage is reshaping how rural clinics across the country approach the recruitment of a large animal veterinarian. Such clinics must start mentoring an individual well before graduation.
“The days of thinking, ‘I just show up at the Iowa College of Veterinary Medicine and recruit somebody a month before graduation,’ doesn’t work anymore,” he said.
“The successful practices that are able to recruit veterinarians today are developing and mentoring students while they’re still in their undergraduate years,” he said. “Those practices are developing relationships today that won’t pay off for four, five, six years.”
Hammersmith and Mayberry are evidence of that investment: both work at clinics back home during breaks in the academic year and credit those relationships with their sustained interest in the field.
Despite the challenges, Grooms said he and his colleagues working to train future veterinarians are “very optimistic that we can help solve this problem.”
Many states are beginning to offer loan repayment programs to graduates who choose rural practices or food-animal medicine to close the compensation gap with urban clinics. Those programs, and other like them, are "chipping away at the issue," Grooms said.
Before entering academia, Grooms started in large animal practice himself and said “there’s tremendous value in working with farmers and helping them to make a living, ensuring their animals are cared for, and making sure, if they’re food-producing livestock, that the food that is being produced is of the highest quality, safe and plentiful.”
"Despite the challenges," he added, "there are tremendous benefits to working in farm animal medicine as well."
