It’s a brisk but sunny spring day as Jeff Messman pulls his pickup into Dave and Gordon Whelan’s dairy farm near Tipton in Lenawee County. Messman makes the drive from Fredonia to the Whelan farm every two weeks. It’s his job to keep the farm’s 200 dairy cattle healthy and producing as much milk as possible.
Pulling green overalls over his jeans and black knee-high rubber boots over his shoes, Messman stuffs his pockets with medicine, antiseptic, lubricant, syringes, several pairs of shoulder-length clear plastic gloves, and a green rubber apron. Then he heads for the barn.
Inside, a dozen black-and-white Holsteins watch warily from a pen as Messman and Dave Whelan review a computer printout listing the date each cow was artificially inseminated with frozen bull sperm. Messman’s job today is to find out how many of them got pregnant. In the world of large-animal veterinary medicine, it’s called a herd check.
For dairy farmers, reproduction is serious business—far too important to let nature take its course. Cows can’t produce milk unless they have calved, and farmers need a regular supply of new calves to maintain or expand the herd. Some farmers even use a bovine analogue of in-vitro fertilization—giving drugs to overstimulate the ovaries of a prized dairy cow, and bringing in a specialist to flush the uterus after fertilization and implant the extra embryos in surrogate mothers.
No blood or urine test can reliably detect pregnancy in a cow. The only way to find out is to reach inside and feel the uterus. If it’s closed, the cow is in the family way. An open uterus means it’s time for another dose of bull sperm. An experienced veterinarian can tell how long a cow has been pregnant just by feeling the embryo. “A thirty-day-old embryo is about the size of a BB,” Messman says.
Walking slowly with arms outstretched, the men herd a cow from the corral into the milking chute. She stands patiently while Messman squirts some lubricant onto his gloved left hand and inserts his arm up to the elbow into the cow’s rectum.
“She’s open,” he tells Whelan.
Messman gives the cow an injection to induce ovulation, so Whelan can try to inseminate again in a few days. Every day a cow stays open is money lost. If the cow is a good milk producer, most farmers will try insemination at least three times. If there’s still no pregnancy, the cow probably will be culled from the herd and slaughtered.
One by one, the cows move into the milking chute for pregnancy checks. As soon as the holding corral empties out, more cows are herded in. Before long, Messman’s glove is smeared with feces, he and Whelan are cracking jokes, cows are mooing and drooling, and—in a corner of the barn—the newest member of the herd is being born.
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Messman’s job is not just messy—it’s dangerous. He says he’s been kicked, though never seriously hurt, by his 1,500-pound patients. “The secret is to stay in the cow’s flight zone,” he says, “so it will move away in the direction you want it to go. The other thing is to stay close to them, because if they kick you when you’re close, the worst that can happen is you’ll be pushed away. If you are far away and catch it at the height of the kick, that’s when it really hurts.”
Luckily, Messman was born for this type of work. Forty years old, with the wiry build of a man who gets lots of exercise, Messman grew up in Chelsea raising steers to show at the Chelsea Community Fair, and he worked on a neighbor’s farm all through high school and college. “I liked working outside with animals and I liked working with farmers, so it was a natural fit,” he says. “Being inside a building all day never appealed to me.”
After graduating on a Friday in 1992 from Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, Messman started work the following Monday for David Bucholtz, founder of the Veterinary Standard, a practice on Pleasant Lake Road near Manchester. When Bucholtz retired in 2005, Messman bought the business.
Since then, he’s hired two MSU-trained veterinarians, Kara Salek Hieber and Andy Smith. Messman handles most of the dairy herd work, but all three vets care for large animals like horses, cows, sheep, goats, and llamas in Washtenaw and five neighboring counties. There are many veterinarians in this area who treat horses, but Messman, Hieber, and Smith are some of the last in southeastern Michigan who still treat other farm animals.
The standard veterinary school curriculum covers all animal species. But unlike most of the students in his graduating class, Messman wasn’t interested in dogs and cats. He was one of just ten veterinarians in a class of 100 who went into large-animal medicine.
Not that long ago, farmers had no trouble finding a vet whenever they needed one. In 1976, when Denny Huehl and his brother started a dairy farm in Freedom Township, there were three nearby: one in Chelsea, one in Saline, and one in Manchester. When one went on vacation, the others covered for him.
Today, the Huehls rely on Messman to take care of their herd of ninety-five cows. “If Jeff wasn’t around, it would be hard for us to stay in business,” Denny Huehl says.
Michelle Kopcha, an associate professor at MSU’s veterinary college, says the number of students pursuing a career in large-animal medicine has been falling steadily for the last twenty-five years. As a result, there’s a national shortage of what are now called food-animal-system veterinarians. “It’s a broad group—anybody involved in the system that takes food from the farm to the grocery store to your table,” Kopcha says.
A 2007 study by the American Veterinary Medical Association reported that about 17 percent of veterinarians in the United States work in food-animal medicine, while more than 70 percent work with companion animals. As older vets continue to retire, the report says, the shortage is likely to get worse.
“Companion-animal medicine is a valuable career choice, but it’s a bit of a luxury,” Kopcha says. “What attracted me to large-animal medicine was the economics of it. Keeping a herd of animals healthy and comfortable and keeping the farmer informed about the newest medicines has a huge impact on whether a farmer stays in business.”
Kopcha says there are several reasons for the shortage of large-animal veterinarians. One is urbanization. “Most of today’s veterinary students grew up in cities or the suburbs,” she says. “Fewer students come from a rural background anymore, so they aren’t familiar with farms or what farm animals need.”
Messman agrees. “It’s hard to find somebody who grew up in a city that wants to wrestle with cows,” he says.
Another factor is the growing trend toward medical specialization. Just like the old-time family doctor who delivered babies and set broken arms, the small-town vet who treated everything from cats to cattle is history. It’s just not possible to stay up-to-date on all the new research and treatments for every animal species.
“I don’t have time to read about diabetic cats or hip replacements in dogs,” says Messman, who keeps a copy of the latest issue of Dairy Herd Management on the dashboard of his truck to read during downtimes. “It’s all I can do to keep up with issues in large-animal medicine.”
The change in focus from farm animals to pets has coincided with a huge gender shift in veterinary medicine, adds Kopcha. When she graduated from veterinary school in 1976, she was one of twelve women in a class of seventy. This year, she says, about 80 percent of the vets graduating from MSU are women.
In the last few years, Kopcha says, veterinary schools and groups like the American Association of Bovine Practitioners and the Academy of Rural Veterinarians have started doing more to promote food-animal-system veterinary medicine. MSU now has a fellowship program in which students work summer jobs for the Michigan Department of Agriculture, the Michigan Farm Bureau, or research institutions, where they learn about the regulatory and public health aspects of the profession.
“We have a huge public health role most people aren’t aware of,” says Kopcha.
Messman is always watching for signs of trouble when he makes a farm call. With cows living together in confined quarters, disease in one animal can spread quickly through an entire herd.
“A lot of stuff goes through your head while you’re out there,” he says. “You can see if the cows are getting thin or a large percentage of them are lame. I can monitor how much antibiotic they’re using. There’s a lot of consulting” with the farmer. “We’re always talking about what’s going on with the herd.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a list of diseases—including rabies, foot-and-mouth disease, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease)—that veterinarians are required to report immediately to state and federal authorities. The farm could be quarantined just on suspicion of such a disease.
In 2000, after an outbreak of bovine tuberculosis in the northern Lower Peninsula, the Michigan Department of Agriculture mandated that every cow in the state be tested. When some cows tested positive, Messman had to quarantine several farms. Fortunately, the results turned out to be false positives; subsequent tests found none had TB, and no cows in southeastern Michigan had to be slaughtered.
Messman also remembers the day he was called to look at a cow that was acting strangely. “I was quite concerned about rabies, because of the way the cow was acting,” he says. The farm was quarantined and the cow was killed, and her head was sent to MSU for testing. “It wasn’t rabies—just an atypical presentation of a neurological disease,” Messman says. “But until we knew the results, all the workers who had contact with that cow’s saliva had to be watched.”
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Farmers do more basic veterinary care on their own now than when Messman started his practice. This is especially true for animals like sheep that are inexpensive to replace. Messman says they’re “hardly worth the vet bill for a farm call.”
But dairy cattle are a different story. Most southeastern Michigan dairy farmers have small herds of 200 or fewer cows. This year, dairy farmers are being paid less for their milk, while costs for feed and fuel have skyrocketed. With profit margins so thin, the health and productivity of every cow is important. So vets get a call whenever something goes wrong.
On the Korte family farm near Clinton, cow 535 is not feeling well. She calved several weeks ago but never resumed normal milk production. Now she has stopped eating. Brothers Brad and Chris Korte are worried. A dairy cow costs $2,000 to $2,500 at auction. They have a lot invested in number 535.
Brad Korte leads the cow into the milking room, where she stands listlessly with head hanging. Messman quickly diagnoses the problem: it’s a displaced or “twisted” abomasum, or fourth stomach—a common complication of calving—that prevents food from passing through the digestive system. Without surgery, the cow will die.
With Messman pulling on the cow’s halter and Korte pushing from behind, they move her into the barn and prepare for surgery. Years ago, farmers had to take cows to veterinarians at MSU for this procedure, which is called a right-flank pyloromentopexy. Now Messman does it right on the farm, and he does it often. “My record is seven in one day,” he says.
Cow 535 will have her surgery standing up. After injecting a spinal nerve block of lidocaine, Messman scrubs the side of the cow and his gloved hands with an antibiotic solution. While the cow stands quietly, he makes a four-inch incision in her skin and through the muscle to expose the abomasum.
Messman reaches inside, pulls out the organ, presses on it to deflate it, puts it back where it belongs, and sutures it in place. Then he closes the incision. It’s all over in about fifteen minutes. The cow doesn’t even need antibiotics—just a day of rest and recovery hanging out with the calves in the barn. “By tomorrow she’ll be back to herself,” Messman tells the brothers. “Just give me a call if she doesn’t snap back the way she should.”
With large-animal veterinarians in such short supply, Messman could move his practice anywhere in the country—especially to California, where huge dairy farms with 1,000 cows are the norm. But he says he loves Washtenaw County and knows that farmers like the Kortes could be forced out of business if the Veterinary Standard were to close.
Besides, Messman obviously loves his work.
“The nice thing is, with the horse and sheep work, I have variety,” he says. “If I just had to do herd checks every day, it could get boring. Sometimes in the wintertime when it’s really cold, I have second thoughts, but I know spring and summer are coming soon. And when I’m driving down a country road in the fall with the autumn leaves on either side, I think, ‘This is a great job.'”
