Challenges Facing Bovine Practitioners with Hemeyer, Latimer and Isensee

One challenge facing many producers is finding a large animal vet in their area. With fewer vet students choosing to pursue large animal medicine, bovine-focused veterinarians are becoming a hot commodity.  
 
 Today’s host Shauna Hermel sat down with Imogene Hemeyer, associate veterinarian with a general veterinary clinic in Monroe City, Mo.; Kirby Latimer, a second-year vet student at the University of Missouri; and Paige Isensee, a fourth-year student at the University of Missouri to discuss bovine veterinary medicine, the challenges facing veterinarians, technology in the industry and why developing a relationship with your bovine practitioner is so important. 

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Transcript

General: 
Angus at Work, a podcast for the profit-minded cattlemen. Brought to you by the Angus Bee Bulletin. We have news and information on health, nutrition, marketing, genetics, and management. So let's get to work, shall we?

Lynsey McAnally:
Hello and welcome back to Angus At Work. One challenge facing many producers is finding a large animal vet in their area. With fewer vet students choosing to pursue large animal medicine, bovine-focused veterinarians are becoming a hot commodity. Today's hosts Shauna Hermel, sat down with Imogene Hemeyer, Kirby Latimer, and Paige Isensee to discuss bovine veterinary medicine, the challenges facing veterinarians, technology and the industry, and why developing a relationship with your bovine practitioner is so important. So let's dive in.

Shauna Hermel:
Hello and welcome to the Angus at Work podcast. I'm Shauna Hermel, editor of the Angus Beef Bulletin. One of the things that we need to address, maybe in the beef industry, is a lack of veterinarians coming back into being in a mixed animal practice or a food animal practice. Imogene, can you tell us a little bit about your career here? And you're in Shelby County, right?

Imogene Hemeyer:
I live in Shelby County. I practice in Marion County right on the border between Marion, Monroe, Shelby and Ralls County. I'm a 1987 graduate of the University of Missouri, College of Vet Med. And I came to Monroe City directly from graduating from the College of Vet Med and have practiced in this area since. I started out doing mixed animal practice along with two other veterinarians, and in 2001 I was offered the chance to just simply do part-time bovine work, and I have pretty much exclusively held to that since that timeframe.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. How many clients would your clinic have started out with maybe back when you first originally started, and what would that clientele look like now?

Imogene Hemeyer:
I'm just estimating, but I'm going to say we had 90 to 100 bovine clients back at that time. And it's funny that you ask that. I drive by so many places anymore and I think so-and-so lived here, so-and-so lived there. They brought cattle to me. I went here and they have since either retired, possibly even passed on and no one took over their operations.

Shauna Hermel:
Has it changed the number of cattle maybe in your area or is it more a number of producers?

Imogene Hemeyer:
I think we have both dropped in the number of producers and in the number of cattle. Overall, most of my producers are a little bigger than when I started out. I had very few herds coming close to a hundred head when I first came to practice. I would say I have in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 herds now that will approach a hundred head.

Shauna Hermel:
So let's talk a little bit about how maybe a practicing veterinary medicine has changed over the last 20 years or so. We just had a change with the veterinary feed directive that was implemented, what about two or three years ago? Maybe more than that now.

Imogene Hemeyer:
I think it's longer than that. I want to say 2017, but I can't quite remember the exact timeframe. But I came into practice in the era where women were not doing large animal medicine.

Shauna Hermel:
You bet.

Imogene Hemeyer:
There was me and one other woman in Northeast Missouri and it wasn't necessarily just with the clients wondering whether women could do that kind of work, but I heard of other veterinarians when they interviewed prospective associates that would laugh if a woman applied.

Shauna Hermel:
Really? Was it because of size and physicality or was it...

Imogene Hemeyer:
That was my guess that they didn't think we could handle the size. And my boss said he asked one of his better producers at the time because he didn't know whether to consider hiring a female, and that particular producer said, "Women know they can't handle a 2000 pound bull. Men just think they can."

Shauna Hermel:
There's probably some truth to that, huh? Aww. As you got into practice, what were some of the things that you, I guess, discovered about the industry?

Imogene Hemeyer:
Things have changed from the fire engine type practice of going to check this sick cow to that sick cow, more to herd health. People asking questions as to what could potentially be wrong, but I'm more concerned about whether this is something that's going to spread through my herd. Those kind of things. I had to learn a lot of the stuff just by doing so much of it. You don't have the opportunity to learn in clinics.

Shauna Hermel:
You bet. Now there is, with the Association of Bovine Practitioners, there is quite a bit of continuing education that you have to go back for. Correct?

Imogene Hemeyer:
And I love that association. I have missed very few of the meetings. My first one started out in Calgary and I think it was the fall of '88, and I've missed very few of the meetings since then. We are required to have 10 hours of continuing education each year to renew our licenses, and that can be like 20 hours or more one year and 10 of those can be carried over for one year. But yes, we do need to continue keeping up with the things that are changing about the industry.

Shauna Hermel:
So now as a lot of that education, is it on actual disease protocols and how to do some diagnostics and treatments? Or is more of that headed toward, as you say, going more toward a whole herd health approach?

Imogene Hemeyer:
It's some of all of that really. We do still have the diagnostics and how to approach different diseases. What can we do to limit calf scours, for example, dealing with respiratory issues in feedlots and backgrounders. But it's not all that. I mean, we deal with consumer concerns as well about antibiotic resistance, about antibiotics being in their meat, which we all know they're required to be antibiotic-free, but there is the concern with the consumer that we need to address.

Shauna Hermel:
You bet. And watching those withdrawal times.

Imogene Hemeyer:
Exactly.

Shauna Hermel:
And things like that, and so many brands, but marketing antibiotic and hormone-free and things. So have you worked a lot as far as education with some consumers to maybe... Or is that your role? Is that any part of the veterinarian's role?

Imogene Hemeyer:
It seems like I try to share information that I learn when I'm there on routine calls, whether it be to work cattle, process calves, or if it's a sick call, I try to just share things that we learned. If somebody brings a scouring calf in, then we talk about, "Well, this is what they suggested at AABP. These are some things that we can do to minimize the spread through the rest of the herd." Those kinds of things as well.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay. Now I know we have your son here, Kirby. He's going to follow in his mom's footsteps, hopefully, with the veterinary career. So Kirby, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you're doing at the University of Missouri, which beat Arkansas today?

Kirby Latimer:
Yes, they did. It was a good game.

Shauna Hermel:
It was a great game.

Kirby Latimer:
But I'm Kirby Latimer. I grew up on a farm here in Shelby County right near Honeywell. I did my undergrad at Mizzou and then I went on and I'm a second year vet student currently at the University of Missouri where I hope to graduate with.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. So what kind precipitated your choice of a veterinarian as a career?

Kirby Latimer:
So I didn't necessarily know I always wanted to be a veterinarian, especially watching my mom. A lot of times, to begin with, I said, "Oh, I don't think I do want to do that." But then I was probably a COVID year of my freshman year of undergrad and I went on farm calls with her because we were sent home. And I got talking to her and I was like, "You know, if I could just do bovine work all the time, I would love to be a veterinarian." And she goes, "Well, you really can do that," And that just sparked an interest in me and ever since then I've just been doing job shadowing with her and other local veterinarians around and really just love working beef cattle and doing medicine with them.

Shauna Hermel:
Not interested in pigs and small animals, huh?

Kirby Latimer:
Not too terribly much. We'll leave that to some other veterinarians if possible.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay. Paige, can you introduce yourself and a little bit about why you chose veterinary medicine as a career?

Paige Isensee:
I'm Paige Isensee, originally from southeast Minnesota. I went over to Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, for my undergrad and then kind of bounced around between Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Dakota before I ended up down in Missouri for vet school. Doing a bunch of different research things related to swine and beef cattle and a little bit of dairy work too, being up north.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay, sure.

Paige Isensee:
That's natural.

Shauna Hermel:
Dairy.

Paige Isensee:
Yeah. Dairy country for sure. I am not like Kirby. I knew I wanted to be a vet the second I was born.

Shauna Hermel:
Oh, wow.

Paige Isensee:
That is all that I've ever said in kindergarten. I was the type that was like, "I'm going to be a veterinarian when I grow up." I didn't want to be a princess or a firefighter or anything like that. Being from a rural background and being heavily involved in FFA is probably why I chose to be a vet. Love for animals and especially large animals. Things that could seemingly turn and kill me in two seconds was like an adrenaline rush.

Shauna Hermel:
Oh, my.

Paige Isensee:
And that's why I was like, "Yep, I want to practice on them."

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent.

Paige Isensee:
Yeah, I'm kind of crazy.

Shauna Hermel:
So now which year are you in school right now?

Paige Isensee:
I am a fourth year.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Paige Isensee:
The light is at the end of the tunnel.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. So how much more do you have before you graduate?

Paige Isensee:
I graduate in May.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Paige Isensee:
Yep.

Shauna Hermel:
And what comes after May? What do you intend to do?

Paige Isensee:
I actually accepted a position at the University of Missouri.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Paige Isensee:
I'm going to be an intern, a food animal intern there. The ultimate goal is to be a food animal internist and work as a referral vet for the state of Missouri and treat all of the cases that other vets maybe don't want to treat or can't quite figure out, and they can call on me to step in and help out.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay. Explain a little bit about an internist. What's that daily work schedule look like?

Paige Isensee:
Yeah. So sometimes it looks like a totally normal vet. Sometimes you can be in the field and go and preg check 200 cows in the morning. Other times it looks like a 2:00 a.m. phone call to treat a downed cow that maybe has listeria or a blocked goat, or sometimes there's random water buffalo being in Missouri that falls into the food animal bucket for some reason.

Shauna Hermel:
Missouri has exotic animals.

Paige Isensee:
Oh, my gosh. Yes. Yes. There's no rules practically on what people can own, so there's a little bit of everything in Missouri. Everything that involves not the basics as far as, yeah, I can go and I can preg check cows and I can vaccinate them and create vaccine protocols, but also, the cases where the vet is like, "I'm not really sure what's going on here." That's when I step in as an internist and use all of my years of training and specialty training to be like, "Oh yeah, have we thought about this avenue or have you thought about this disease process," that a few years back in Missouri, it was Bacillary Hemoglobinuria, which is a new thing to Missouri and Northeast Missouri probably three years ago roughly.
And that's something that the internist down at Mizzou had stepped in and we were like, "This is something that we should consider." And vets that are out in practice every day hadn't considered it because it's nothing that they've had to see.

Shauna Hermel:
What does it show as? What does it?

Paige Isensee:
The layman term is red water. We see acute death in cattle. We'll see port wine, urine in the bladder, jaundice everywhere. It's usually associated with flukes and...

Shauna Hermel:
With liver flukes.

Paige Isensee:
Liver flukes. Yeah. We'll see liver fluke tracks on necropsy and usually the time that we diagnose it is on necropsy and then we have to step in and talk with the vet who's on the site every day and on the ground, like boots on the ground, and put into motion a herd management and how can we tweak it. Tweak the vaccine protocol or tweak how they rotate through pastures, anything we can do to minimize death.

Shauna Hermel:
And so you work with that whole thing as a diagnostic measure for the whole herd as an internist.

Paige Isensee:
Yep.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay. Excellent.

Paige Isensee:
Yep.

Shauna Hermel:
So Kirby, let's talk a little bit about what your hope for your career aspirations are when you have what, two more years?

Kirby Latimer:
Yep. Two more years. Counting down the days. But no, upon graduation I would hopefully, ideally, get a job primarily practicing large animal somewhere. Obviously, some small animal, but ideally go and make some mistakes elsewhere, kind of thinking maybe early on if need be. And then, ultimately, come back here in northeast Missouri and practice and would love to open up my own large animal practice facility someday.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. So what challenges do you envision ahead of you to make that happen? And I would ask that for both of our young.

Kirby Latimer:
So some challenges that I would anticipate happening would be, I think it's very important to have a good mentor because a lot of times we don't learn every single thing that we can immediately in vet school. And getting thrown out our first year, first five years into being a vet, there's a lot of things that we can sometimes focus on. They call it looking at zebras a lot of times rather than looking at a big picture.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Kirby Latimer:
I think just being able to rely on those that have had that experience and learning or asking questions and not, if you don't know what is necessarily going on in a case, don't be afraid to ask questions I think. And a lot of times, while you don't learn that, just being able to know that you can have people that have experienced something like that being able to rely on.

Shauna Hermel:
All right. Paige, let's talk to you a little bit about what you see as some of those challenges out there and how you're planning on overcoming those and what's important getting started.

Paige Isensee:
For me, personally, it's going to be mentorship and that is a very common answer that you're going to get from many, many vet students that are about to enter the field these days because we all know that as we go through clinics, we don't get to do everything and we don't get to learn everything. And just because I read it once in didactics in the classroom does not mean I know what is going on and I need somebody who has done it, been there, done that to be like, "Hey, here's a little guidance."

Shauna Hermel:
Didactics. Okay, explain.

Paige Isensee:
Yes. Didactics is the time that we spend in the classroom while we're in vet school. So at Mizzou it's a two-and-two program, so we spend two years in the classroom, nose in the books learning, and then we spend two years on the clinic floor rotating through various rotations.

Shauna Hermel:
Let's talk a little bit about maybe some of the things that inspired you to follow into, you say talking to your mentors and how do they inspire you to continue into this field?

Paige Isensee:
I see that they actually love what they do and I am a very passionate person and I love to pour myself into my work and my mentors also do that and seeing that it is possible and it's an option and you don't get burnt out in 10, 20, 30 years down the road, you can still love what you're doing and still feel like you're a part of a community. Whether the community is like a county, or a section of a state, or a tri-state area, it's something that you feel like you're making an impact everywhere and it fills my cup, as I say.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. Kirby, how about you?

Kirby Latimer:
I would also agree that seeing all those that I've job shadowed, it has been really cool to see how they love what they do every single day and that they get up every single morning looking forward toward the day and knowing that they don't get burnt out. It's really cool to be able to see that there's a work-life or yeah, like a work-life balance, being able to maintain. Enjoy what you're doing, but also be able to separate work and have a life too. For example, my mother, she works but also is able to have time to come back to the farm and being able to be involved in the farm and other things on a daily life as well is super, very important to me, and inspires me to be able to see that it is possible to do both.

Shauna Hermel:
Is part of that, I guess maybe a change in the veterinary field with more clinical practices that have multiple veterinarians than having an individual and...

Kirby Latimer:
Yeah, I would definitely agree that there's a lot more being able to have time off, I guess you would say. There's a lot more clinical or clinics around that have more associate veterinarians on staff and I think that's very important to keep them from getting burnt out because when there's a clinic that oversees a lot of say 10,000 beef cattle and there's only one associate vet around to do that, I think it's very, very easy to get burnt out and when you're continually seeing the same thing over and over again and you just don't see any light at the end of the tunnel, so having more associates on staff to be able to distribute the workload I think is very important and also learn so a longer longevity from a veterinarian's standpoint. Okay.

Shauna Hermel:
Anything to add to that, Paige, or...

Paige Isensee:
No, I don't think so. He actually did a good job..

Shauna Hermel:
As far as how things are changing out there in the industry and how would you anticipate doing things differently than maybe what the veterinary field has had? We've got a lot of changes in technology. We've got a lot of changes in regulations that are out there and how's that going to change for the veterinarian in five years from now than the veterinarian 10 years ago?

Paige Isensee:
I'm actually very passionate about this.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Paige Isensee:
I am a very progressive person. I like to learn every day. I want to wake up, I want to learn something, I want to learn things from different states, different vets, different countries, how are they progressing in some area and how am I not progressing in that area at the same time and see how I can extrapolate what they're doing and try to integrate it into what I'm doing. And I use technology a lot as many people do in today's age. I think that I'm very passionate about using technology and integrating it into the herd. And the being in Missouri, it's a beef state and there isn't always technology on farm or integrated into the vet side of things or the farm side of things, and I push to have that to be a thing.
Technology can save me time, make me and the producer more efficient, and I can also use it to extrapolate data to look at different sets of different values and assess how the herd is doing, or in this case of an outbreak, I can pull data and look at, "Oh, here's where an area where I think we were lacking that could have led to this outbreak and here's how we can be better in the future." Ultimately saving the producer money and time, hopefully, in the future as well, and minimizing the hit to their herd during an outbreak. Another thing, like technology-wise that isn't just data on numbers on a computer and keeping track of records is ultrasound technology. I think that's starting to become a big thing in the cattle industry, especially with preg checking.
That's very common to have the vet come out and use an ultrasound, but I think the ultrasound is a tool that is in the vet's toolbox that can be used in so many different ways, like on dairies where ultrasounding lungs a lot, and I think that could be implemented more in the beef side of things.

Shauna Hermel:
Really?

Paige Isensee:
Yeah. Because you can see a lot more with the ultrasound technology. I can't see, I don't have special X-ray eyes to see what's going on. My stethoscope only tells me so much when I'm listening, so seeing what's going on with ultrasound waves helps a lot too. And you can also look into the abdomen. It may take some specialized training, but it's very easy to get it. I have chased that during my clinical rotation and it has been very easy to come by if you're willing to go out and find it. And then I have the opportunity to go on to a beef farm or ranch and they have a sick calf. We can't figure out what it is. Instead of just saying like, "Oh, probably just not doing right," or "Probably scours, I don't know. Let's just try this and see what happens."
You can slap an ultrasound on the abdomen, look at things and be like, "Oh, here's some internal abscesses from a umbilical infection. This could be leading to septicemia or something like that." You can do a little bit further diagnostics and save the time and money of a potential lost calf or...

Shauna Hermel:
And really there wouldn't be much stress added to the calf at all or...

Paige Isensee:
Not at all. Not at all.

Shauna Hermel:
And a lot less stress to the veterinarian or the producer to try and see the problem as well.

Paige Isensee:
Yeah. When we're going and aimlessly treating things or just trying to empirically treat things like, "Oh, it could probably maybe be this. Let's try this and see what happens," and then it doesn't work, and then we're on treatment three and it still hasn't worked and now we've thrown a bunch of antibiotics at a calf that we maybe didn't need to throw at in the first place. It's an opportunity that if you just put an ultrasound on it in the first place, saw that, "Oh, great," then maybe we could change how we treat things. Sometimes it doesn't affect things and that's fine, but I think-

Shauna Hermel:
That could be win-win for the producer, the calf, and actually veterinarian and the consumer as well.

Paige Isensee:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Shauna Hermel:
Kirby, how about you? What technologies do you think are out there that will change the way you do things?

Kirby Latimer:
She really hit the nail on the head. I would say the biggest piece of technology that I'm around on a daily basis is an ultrasound. Like she had said, there's a lot of things that are underutilized I think with an ultrasound. A lot of those that I'm still out there chasing and have yet to find myself, like the ultrasound in the lungs or the abdomen. Currently, I am using ultrasound to fetal age calves, working on fetal sexing calves. I'm not real sure how beneficial that'll be to the producer from an aspect, unless it's obviously a genetics standpoint, but I would say the biggest piece would be ultrasounding. I think also implementing data points and being able to implement those into herds or producers around, like she was talking about. Just being able to help the producer make more money in the long run because by the producer staying in business in turn helps us stay in business too. Us as veterinarians, as we have a longer longevity there too.

Shauna Hermel:
Let's talk about what does the veterinary client-patient relationship that VCPR, what does that mean to you?

Kirby Latimer:
I might have you step in here too some, mom. But currently, I would think that just being able to talk to those clients and being able to see them several times throughout the year and having them call you if they have any questions or concerns or yeah, they want to work with cattle, we go out there and we establish that veterinary client patient relationship. But yeah, I think just being able to establish that VCPR with other clients around and letting them know that you can go to them and they can come to you at any point in time and just being able to establish that trust with them. It goes both ways and say they need a VFD, we can write a VFD for them eventually once we have that relationship.

Shauna Hermel:
So Imogene, how about you? When you think about the producers who are pretty good, have a lot of cow savvy. A lot of them know how to take care of animals. And until it gets down to the nitty-gritty, how do you change a mindset to want to do that whole herd plan and what can they save in terms of money and cattle?

Imogene Hemeyer:
Well, for the VCPR, I believe what the regulations kind of state is that you have made a visit to the farm at least once during 12 months, and I have a few people who have asked me for that and I haven't been there in 12 years.

Shauna Hermel:
Oh, my.

Imogene Hemeyer:
And I say, "I'm sorry, I just can't do that. I need to know what you're doing on your farm. I can't tell you how many cows you have. Do you have 10 or do you have a hundred?" Some of them have understood what I mean by that, and I do set foot on their farm and it has led to helping with other problems that they may have, and a few of them, I think just kind of roll their eyes and go on without that VFD because they don't want to establish it.

Shauna Hermel:
So Paige, when we're talking about keeping records, you keep some on your own herd, right?

Paige Isensee:
Yes, yes, absolutely. I'm very passionate about keeping a lot of records probably because I have a research background and I kind of have the research brain going on all the time.

Shauna Hermel:
You bet.

Paige Isensee:
Data is never to go to waste. You `collect it, and then we can deal with it later whether we use it right now or later.

Shauna Hermel:
So do you do that in Excel sheets? Do you do it in your...

Paige Isensee:
Yeah, so I wrote a program kind of based in Google Sheets that is specific to our herd, but I can adapt it to other herds and use it to share on herds that we maybe work with or consult with a little bit to keep track of all of our records. It has every cow in there, it has every calf in there, everything that's ever happened to them if they've been treated, if they were moved to a different pasture, if this bull was introduced to them on X date.

Shauna Hermel:
Sounds like there might be a lot of information that you would never use in the future, but a lot that you might.

Paige Isensee:
Yes, yes. We sometimes don't use it all seemingly until we think of a question six months down the road when we're weaning calves or we're going to sell calves to go to the feed yard or something like that, and then we have a question to look back on or fast-forward to the next calving season and we're having a bunch of scour problems and we want to look back at what happened to these cows in the last year, or did they get a different vaccine protocol than what we usually do due to some back order or extraneous circumstance. And seemingly then the information that we think we would never use is stuff that I look back and try to pull from.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. Now, how do you parse that out? I mean, if you find a problem, how do you dig through that data to find what you need?

Paige Isensee:
Usually, many hours of sometimes troubleshooting with the crew and being like, "Okay, what are our questions? What are we trying to answer here?" And then I go back and see if I have a category of data that specifically answers that question, and that's the easy time where I'm like, "Yep. Here, here, here. Check, check. These are our answers. Great." Other times I have to turn on my research brain and crank it up to 10 and sit and dig through stuff for three to hundreds of hours.

Shauna Hermel:
Now, to me, that sounds like the perfect reason for veterinary client-patient relationship is to have somebody who enjoys doing that rather than have somebody who would rather be out checking the calves and seeing which one's going to be the next national champion or stud bull, right?

Paige Isensee:
Yes, absolutely. I love doing all of the data side of things and think it's very valuable. I want to do that for all of the herds that I consult and work for in the future. I think it is priceless for me to spend an afternoon in the office rather than out on farm, digging through some records that we have from a given farm that has an outbreak and being like, here's how we can treat it right now and here's how we can prevent it in the future.

Shauna Hermel:
You talked a little bit about red water and it being kind of a new disease to this area coming north. Liver flukes have been starting coming north, but we have other diseases that are entering the area as well. How important is it to have that veterinary client-patient relationship in a community to be able to spot those group problems so that if it shows up, if something shows up here, and it shows up here, maybe it's not something just to turn your head and say, "Oh, well."

Paige Isensee:
Yes, absolutely. It is super important to be able to call somebody from a couple counties over or across the state or a couple states over and be like, "Hey, having the situation kind of a weird thing. Have you heard of this?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, I've had five of them." And then you can kind of collaborate and talk about what have they done that worked or what have you done that's worked or has not worked specifically. And super important to be able to call on other vets and many times help fast-track your treatment process or herd management process.

Shauna Hermel:
For some young people who might be being born and deciding they want to be a vet or maybe deciding, "Okay, I want to work beef cows for the rest of my life." What kind of advice would you give them for, say, a high school student that would be interested in following a veterinary profession? What advice do you have?

Paige Isensee:
I think my biggest point of advice would be to go and shadow a vet. It's not for the faint of heart sometimes, and it's super important that you go and follow a vet or five vets, as many as you can. And sometimes it's spending days in the clinic doing small animal work and sometimes it's spending days in the truck going from farm to farm doing large animal work. And I encourage everybody to do that as much as possible because you don't know until you are boots on the ground and actually doing the work and you're like, "Oh, I really love this and I didn't expect to at all." Or you're like, "Wow, I actually don't like this at all." And I definitely think you should figure that out before you commit to the whole eight-year process of vet school.

Kirby Latimer:
Yeah, I would definitely agree with her there. I think that job shadowing is the biggest piece of advice that I would have for prospects of becoming a veterinarian. Making sure that that is what you want to do because once you get into vet school, speaking from experience, it is very hard. There's lots of long days, lots of long studying, and then when you get into clinics, lots of working hours that they do. And I just think that once you're in there, I think it's also very important to remember why you were there and knowing that yes, this is what I want to do. This is what I've learned from my job, shadowing as a high schooler or even younger or later. However, whenever you choose to do so, I think it's just very important to remember why you were doing it once you get there.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. Imogene.

Imogene Hemeyer:
I think I enjoy the job shadows, especially from the students because we can learn so many things from them. I love having the students and oftentimes, yeah, I have my old area of what I tend to treat something with, but then I also like to ask them, what do they teach you now? What would you recommend in a case like this? They can teach us so many things, even though we do get those 10 hours of CE each year, we may not have...

Shauna Hermel:
You bet.

Imogene Hemeyer:
Yeah. May not have touched on that subject.

Shauna Hermel:
It's always interesting to bring somebody new in. I know from our internships there at Angus and just that different outlook when they look at what we're doing and why, it's kind of invigorating, kind of fun. So did you come up with that case study?

Imogene Hemeyer:
Well, it's nothing real earth-shattering. I guess I was thinking more in terms of one where they couldn't figure out why they had so many open cows. I hadn't been there a whole lot and so they did actually call upon us and come to find out we were lacking some nutrition, that kind of stuff and they have become one of my better clients now.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. So where, in your mind, could producers profit the most by making better use of their relationship with their veterinarian?

Imogene Hemeyer:
As Paige said, I really think keeping records, things like that. Whether they do it themselves, on a tablet with their wife standing there keeping track of things, or whether they pay a veterinarian or someone else to do that kind of record keeping. I think they can... The big thing there is not what one death will do, but okay, we've got to prevent any more from this becoming a herd outbreak type thing. What happened with this particular calf? Is this just a one-time thing? Is it something else going to transpire? That kind of stuff.

Shauna Hermel:
We just did an industry insight study with the Angus media that part... Two parts. One part looked at feedlots and surveying feedlots and one surveying the cow-calf industry. And definitely, the health protocols and the health readiness of those calves at purchase was the most important thing to the feedlots. Do you find that producers are becoming more concerned about that and are utilizing you more for that health verification on vaccine protocols and utilizing you more in that way?

Imogene Hemeyer:
I do think so. I can't think how many years ago it was, but there was a presentation at AABP about the increase in price that the calves brought if they had the full set of vaccinations and backgrounding. And also the difference between if the producer had done it themselves or if it was signed off on by a veterinarian. And at that particular time, it was like $3 to $4 a hundred if the producer had done it themselves. But then if they had a veterinarian do it increased it to another seven.

Shauna Hermel:
To having that guarantee that that third party...

Imogene Hemeyer:
That it was done properly. Yes.

Shauna Hermel:
You bet. You bet. That could be a significant payment toward-

Imogene Hemeyer:
Right.

Shauna Hermel:
... some of that consulting. Right? All right. For our Angus Work podcast, we like to end things on a real positive note. So if you would, would you be willing to share something, it can be personal or professional or related to school, something positive that is happening in your life right now?

Imogene Hemeyer:
My positive is my son sitting here beside me, having decided to go to vet school and his lovely friend who we think the world of sitting next to him.

Kirby Latimer:
But I think one of my positive things that is currently going on in my life is that we have started a direct to consumer meat business where we feed out our feedlot calves on our farm, and from there we will take it to a processor and we will sell individual cuts to producers around or to consumers around, excuse me, where they can have the option, where they can choose quarters, halves, or whole beef if they want to, or say they just want two T-bones, two rib eyes, five pounds of ground beef. Sure, we got it for you. Just come knock on our door.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent. So you're seeing it all the way through the system?

Kirby Latimer:
Yes, we are. Yeah.

Shauna Hermel:
Excellent.

Paige Isensee:
Considering we live together, I would probably have to say that positive is our direct to consumer business. It has been going very well, and we've got to loop in not only our own beef, but pork from a local producer and lamb from a local producer. And then on top of that, I'm going to finish my board exam on Monday.

Shauna Hermel:
Wonderful.

Paige Isensee:
So yay.

Shauna Hermel:
Yay,

Paige Isensee:
Yay.

Shauna Hermel:
Well, thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your insights in the veterinary profession and how, hopefully, that spells a good future for the beef industry and we definitely depend on veterinarians to help get us through each year and we are thankful to have you back in the business. So thank you.

Kirby Latimer:
Thank you. We appreciate it.

General: 
Listeners, for more information on making Angus work for you, check out the Angus Beef Bulletin and the Angus Beef Bulletin Extra. You can subscribe to both publications in the show notes. If you have questions or comments, let us know at adbeditorial@angus.org and we would appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Podcast and share this episode with any other profit-minded cattlemen. Thanks for listening. This has been Angus at Work.