Problem-solving skills are vital for food animal veterinarians since they diagnose and treat animals in their practice. The skills-set required to solve issues on dairy farms involves veterinary care for individual animals and a herd level approach encompassing reproduction, calf management, feeding and nutrition, milking practices, barn design and overall farm management.
An innovative training program at the University of
Guelph’s Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) equips fourth-year doctor of veterinary
medicine (DVM) students with the right tools to analyze dairy herd issues.
Fourth year OVC DVM students Brittany Hale and Gillian Marson evaluate stocking density during a farm visit.
The two-week dairy herd problem-solving rotation, created 10 years ago, brings together student vets from OVC and their colleagues at Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
Fourth-year OVC students choose one of four ‘streams’ in their final and clinical year of study—food animal, small animal, equine or rural community practitioner— and complete rotations in various areas of veterinary medicine throughout the year. The dairy herd problem-solving rotation, within the food animal stream, includes one week at OVC focusing on Ontario dairy herds and one week in Michigan at Green Meadows Dairy with the farm’s 3,300-cow milking herd.
“There is tremendous value in the interaction between the students from the two countries and the differing milking systems,” says Dr. Todd Duffield, professor in OVC’s population medicine department. “I think the exposure to different management styles and systems is really useful.”
The first two days at OVC focus on basic problem-solving tools, says Duffield. “We talk to students about evidence-based practice to help them determine if the changes they are seeing in a herd are normal, as well as the use and evaluation of clinical tests.”
Read the entire article in the Milk Producer magazine online starting on page 30.