Farm Veterinarian Shortage

We can't find enough people to treat cows, pigs, and horses.

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NPR (“There’s a shortage of vets to treat farm animals. Pandemic pets are partly to blame“):

One night last spring, Andy Berry, a livestock farmer in Mississippi, was working the phone. One of his cows was experiencing a life-threatening breech birth and his regular veterinarian, 40 minutes away, was unavailable.

Berry, who is also executive vice president of the Mississippi Cattlemen’s Association, spent two hours calling around for help, finally reaching another vet, who immediately made the one-hour drive to his farm in rural Jefferson Davis County.

By the time she arrived, it was too late. “Ultimately, we ended up losing both the cow and the calf,” Berry, 48, says. “Between the time it took to get to the farm and the complications of the labor, it was too much.”

The death of the cow and calf cost him about $1,800, he says.

So, sad story. But one would think it would have cost at least $1800 for a veterinarian to travel 40 minutes each way to deliver a breeched calf.

Experiences similar to Berry’s are becoming more common across the country. For decades, farmers have endured a shortage of rural veterinarians – the kind who specialize in care for animals like cows, pigs and sheep. But the problem is now at an all-time high – with 500 counties across 46 states reporting critical shortages this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

While I had given this zero thought before this morning, it’s not shocking. For reasons I don’t understand, there are only 32 accredited schools in the United States—compared to 156 medical schools. It’s literally harder to get into vet school than med school and, naturally, most are folks who want to help family pets.

“We are losing animals because we just have no one to come to the farm in time to save them,” said Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) in a Dec. 6 hearing of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. “We have counties in Mississippi that don’t even have a large animal veterinarian.”

The shortage is mirrored by a growth in the number of veterinarians that Americans are much more familiar with – those who take care of the family pet. Since at least the early 2000s, more veterinarians have chosen the better pay and more reasonable work hours that go with a practice that focuses primarily or exclusively on “companion” animals. With the COVID-19 pandemic-driven spike in pet ownership, demand – and salaries – for companion animal veterinarians have increased rapidly, according to the American Veterinary Medicine Association, or AVMA.

So, combine a shortage of slots for training veterinarians and plenty of demand for the more glamorous side of the business, it’s no wonder.

The implications of this shortfall go beyond the farm. Some farmers and the AVMA warn that without enough vets on the front line, the food supply chain is vulnerable to diseases such as foot and mouth and swine flu.

“Food-animal veterinarians are a front-line defense in the surveillance, prevention, treatment, and control of animal diseases,” AVMA President Dr. Lori Teller wrote in an email to NPR. “Veterinarians help to protect the health and welfare of animals that produce eggs, milk, meat, wool, and other protein and fiber products,” she says.

So, again, that’s bad. But, again, here’s the issue:

Teller says that among veterinary school graduates, nearly half are choosing to work exclusively with companion animals, with another 8% selecting mixed practices, where they might treat a dog and cat one day and a cow the next. Fewer than 3% of recent graduates choose to work exclusively with food animals, with others deciding to pursue advanced degrees or go into specialties, such as horse care.

Despite the clear need, many who start out working with food animals find that the grueling and sometimes dangerous work leads to burnout.

Dr. Remington Pettit, 37, has seen both sides of the profession. She grew up in rural Oklahoma, and attended veterinary school at Oklahoma State University. When Pettit graduated, she chose to work in mixed practices, focusing on the treatment of horses and cattle in her native state.

“I worked the sale barn,” Pettit says, referring to cattle auctions. “I did spay-neuter. I did farm calls. I did emergencies. It was all hours of the day, 365 days a year.” In the rural area she covered, a considerable amount of driving to appointments made the days even longer.

About five years ago, she hit a breaking point. Pettit, 37, was still carrying university debt, and just starting a family. For her, it was mainly exhaustion and the physical toll of working with large animals that prompted a switch to companion animals – where she says she makes double the money she did just a few years ago. But the physical demands of the job and its inherent dangers were also factors in her decision, she says.

“It’s hard work,” she says. “It’s hard on your shoulders. It’s hard on your knees.”

“I remember two weeks before I left the practice I got pinned between two heifers and a sheep when I was palpating them and thank goodness I didn’t break anything because I am very tough,” she says. “But I just remember thinking that I want to be around for my kids, I want to be around for my grandkids.”

That’s a theme echoed by many large-animal veterinarians. A 2020 study found more than half of all veterinarians reported work-related injuries over a two-year period, with those working with large farm animals twice as likely to get hurt.

“Getting hurt is a daily concern for men and women,” says Dr. Christine Navarre, a professor at Louisiana State University’s School of Animal Sciences. “I think that a lot of our incoming students maybe have a romanticized view of veterinary medicine.”

“TV doesn’t help that. And then they get out there and they’re faced with this huge amount of debt in a rural area that’s isolated,” Navarre says. Vet school graduates are “mostly female, so you throw a few kids in there and you throw some struggles with daycare, and they just give up at about five years.”

Dr. Roger Dudley, state veterinarian at the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, left a mixed practice 10 years ago, where he had worked with “both small and large animals in a small town.”

“Physically, my body started to complain,” Dudley, 58, says. “I spent 21 years in practice and the last seven of those years I was by myself.”

That’s just not a sustainable lifestyle. I would also conjecture from the opening anecdote that the pay is terrible. If you’re in a rural area and have to drive 40 minutes each way to treat an animal—and that animal is only worth $1800 to the farmer—it’s got to be really hard to make a living. It’s hard to get out of the vet’s office with a dog or cat for under $300 for a half-hour visit, most of which is spent with relatively low-paid technicians. If the animal is sick, it’s not hard to spend considerably more than that. The vet likely sees half a dozen animals over the course of an hour. No driving. No demanding physical labor. Very little risk of injury.

Veterinarians spend four years in vet school after completing an undergraduate degree. On average, they leave school with nearly $190,000 in debt, says Dr. Rosslyn Biggs, the director of continuing education for the College of Veterinary Medicine at Oklahoma State University. In 2021, the mean starting salary for a veterinarian working exclusively or predominantly in the treatment of food animals was about $85,000, compared to more than $100,000 for those who specialize in pet care, according to the AVMA.

“When you’ve got six figures of debt and then you’re looking at trying to buy a practice or buy into a practice, and then the equipment and technology related to that, those numbers become hard to finance,” Biggs says.

Indeed.

For more than a decade, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been offering a program that provides up to $75,000 in veterinary school loan repayment to those who agree to work in underserved rural communities for a minimum of three years. But there’s not enough money in the program to fill the gaps in rural communities, critics say. Some in Congress, such as Mississippi Sen. Hyde-Smith, are pushing to expand the program and to make the awards tax-free.

“I think it’s going to be a hard void to fill,” acknowledges Bob Smith, national program leader for animal health at the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. “We need to do a better job of educating and introducing the kids in secondary schools and in high schools to agriculture and to the possibilities of veterinary medicine.”

If the “education” consisted of nothing more than reading this article, they would choose another career! It’s incredibly hard to get into vet school. The $75,000 incentive for three years of service barely offsets the salary differential.

Meanwhile, starting in June of 2023, access to common antibiotics, such as penicillin and tetracycline, which have long been available to farmers over the counter, will require a vet’s prescription.

That’s rather obviously rent-seeking.

“Some of these people who have smaller herds are going to run into problems,” predicts Jeff Beasley, who has been farming for 30 years in southern Illinois. “They’re not just going to be able to go down to the store and get that anymore.”

The vet shortage is of bigger concern for small farm operations and could lead to further consolidation in the industry, says Dr. Brenton Credille, an associate professor at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine. Some critics say that could reduce competition and limit opportunities for independent farmers.

Which is almost certainly why the law was changed.

He says veterinarians working with large animals in rural areas need to shift their focus to preventative care in order to avoid getting burned out.

“It’s a two-pronged issue, where veterinarians need to get out and educate producers … and [do] a better job of teaching students the dynamics of preventive care without forgetting the emergency side of things that every student is really familiar with,” Credille says.

Berry, the farmer who lost his cow and calf last year, doesn’t think things will get better anytime soon. On the horizon, he sees “a big retirement of aging large [animal] practitioners out there serving communities.”

It seems to me that the obvious solution is to expand the field of practitioners. We should open more veterinary schools. But, surely, a lot of these services could be provided by someone who doesn’t have eight years of post-secondary education? We have all manner of people training humans without MDs: physician assistants, licensed practical nurses, nurses, and the like. Couldn’t we create a pipeline of these folks to treat farm animals?

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Kevin McKenzie says:

    To a very large degree, as you say, it’s a problem of incentives and supply. It’s harder to become a vet than a doctor, you make less money, and the reality of it is that even as a small animal vet, you spend a lot of your time euthanizing animals, not saving them. I in no mean am saying it isn’t valuable work, but we rely on people really, really wanting to become vets to maintain what supply there is.

    However, I’ll object to the statement about rent seeking; at least in theory, the reason to restrict the prescription of animal medications is to prevent the massive overuse of them, which leads to antibiotic resisting bacteria, which are a problem.

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  2. Slugger says:

    Veterinarian school positions are very difficult to obtain and academic classes are very expensive. This creates an obvious choke point for entry into the profession. How about taking a step back and promoting apprenticeship paths into licensure? After two preclinical years in an academic setting let candidates choose apprenticeship programs where they would work, and get paid, while accumulating skills. A qualifying exam would allow the achievers to legitimately call themselves DVMs. There quite a few veterinarian techs in the offices my pets patronize who would be happy to be able to achieve higher professional credentials. I think that lawyers were admitted to the bar through similar programs in the past.

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  3. Rick DeMent says:

    Not to mention that as a Food animal vet you are stuck in a rural area that is not exactly the most exciting place to be for a new grad unless you are already from one of those areas. I would think that for most students who have the aptitude for the rigor of being a vet, finance or engineering would be a more attractive choice.

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  4. MarkedMan says:

    I worked extensively with a veterinary surgeon who used to operate on race horses and he really changed my perspective on what it meant to be a large animal veterinarian. He was 6′ 3″ and in good physical condition and was very skeptical of physically small people doing the job. He pointed out that for some operations you had to get deep inside the animal and move and hold the liver out of the way for a half hour or more, and it weighed about 80 pounds. He also commented on how even a calm horse could casually and unintentionally squeeze you between themselves and a stall and break your ribs.

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  5. steve says:

    Rural pay is lower. Same is true in medicine. Then people wonder why you cant get people to work in rural areas. Plus, the schools are often worse. Medical care is worse for your family. Its nice to be needed and if you like hunting and fishing its not a bad choice, but you can live in small towns or even suburbs and still do that. I think the problem persists until pay goes up. In medicine it is largely resolved by having the crappy doctors who cant get jobs in the more populated areas getting jobs in rural areas that are desperate. Not to say all rural docs are weak but it is much more likely.

    Steve

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  6. OzarkHillbilly says:

    I don’t know. My vet’s have several large animal vets on staff.

    But, surely, a lot of these services could be provided by someone who doesn’t have eight years of post-secondary education? We have all manner of people training humans without MDs: physician assistants, licensed practical nurses, nurses, and the like.

    And their vet techs take on all sorts of procedures that some might think reserved to vets.

    shrug… I don’t raise anything more than poultry, so this is a little out of my realm.

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  7. wr says:

    Hmm. Maybe if we did something really radical, like having states fund their colleges and universities so that someone could graduate without hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, people could go into fields where they were performing a service for the community without the need to cash in.

    Oh, no, wait, that would require taxing rich people again. Nevermind!

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  8. Gavin says:

    Is there anything between “vet tech” and full vet? This discussion sounds similar to the rationale used to create the PA [physician assistant] career path underneath MD which often staff the less acute sides of large ED’s. PA is usually a 2-year program rather than the 4yr MD and is analogous to the first 2-yrs of med school.

    But hey, maybe farmers just need to have those animals consistently die for 10 years before they decide that they could take collective action and work with the vet profession to find and/or demand a solution including increasing pay to farmers for livestock so they can afford increased medicinal bills and in that way inspire someone to start a practice nearby.
    However, because their chosen politics demands they believe collective action is worse than Communism, looks like nothing can be done and so bankruptcy it shall be as well as animals dying young!

    Also, instead of just “everyone wants to work with cats” .. perhaps the smart people who will be able to choose virtually any profession including vet might simply not want to take a rural vet position no matter the compensation because they’d have to work around a bunch of people who despise them for their intelligence. Mark this down as another unintended consequence of decades of Faux News ginning hatred against Coastal Elites just to whip a few votes.

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  9. Blue Galangal says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: The salary issue is the same for vet techs as for vets, though. Our satellite campus runs a vet tech 2-year degree that pulls from all over the region. The main campus keeps pushing for a 4-year degree but there’s a ceiling for vet tech salaries that is ~$17-18/hr. No student is going to pay for a 4 year degree where they make $18/hr – and the veterinary practices so far have not been willing to get behind this effort and offer more money for a person holding a 4-year degree.

    Related to that, I think you’re going to see a lot of Rx by mail for those farmers because it’s simply not feasible to be a small farmer and not be able to use antibiotics to treat issues without calling out a vet – who may or may not exist and who certainly will just prescribe over the phone rather than make a 40 mile journey to treat what the farmer could treat himself last year. If the government is concerned about antibiotic resistant bacteria, as usual, they should put their money where their mouth is and not off load more costs onto small farmers (Big Farma will of course continue their practices, and they’re the cause of much of the problems in the first place).