High Schoolers Are Training to Fill the Rural Large Animal Vet Shortage. This Program Is Why There's Hope.

The large animal veterinarian shortage in the United States is not a new problem. But a program out of UC Davis is addressing it at the root, before students talk themselves out of it, before their parents tell them it's not realistic, and before the socioeconomic math of eight years of post-secondary education closes the door entirely.

FarmVet2B is a USDA-funded high school internship program based at the UC Davis Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center in Tulare County, California. For the past two years it has been placing high school juniors from across Tulare County into hands-on veterinary experiences during spring break and summer, with the explicit goal of building a pipeline of livestock veterinarians for rural communities that desperately need them.

The results, even at small scale, are worth paying attention to.

The Problem It's Trying to Solve

Sharif Aly, professor at the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine and one of the program's architects, puts the crisis plainly. There are far fewer large animal veterinarians than the profession needs. In rural areas, farms are going out of business because veterinary health care expertise simply isn't available. The Central Valley, one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world, is among the areas most acutely affected.

The shortage has multiple causes, but one of the most correctable is the drop-off in veterinary interest that happens in the final years of high school. Aly describes it as a near-universal phenomenon: ask students from third grade through eighth or ninth grade if they want to be a vet, and almost all of them say yes. Ask again senior year, and the number has collapsed.

Some of that collapse is driven by messaging, teachers and parents steering kids away from what sounds like an unreachable goal. Some of it is the financial reality of the educational path. FarmVet2B targets both.

What the Internship Actually Looks Like

The program mixes hands-on clinical exposure with farm visits, facility tours, and direct conversations with admissions staff from UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Participants have practiced suture patterns, applied ear tattoos as proof of vaccination, prepared culture plates with milk samples, used ultrasound equipment to detect objects embedded in gelatin molds, and observed procedures including Brucella vaccinations in dairy heifers.

They've also visited the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory, toured the Milk Quality Lab, and heard directly from livestock veterinarians in local practice about what the day-to-day reality of the work looks like, including the staffing shortages those clinics are actively navigating.

Gaby Maier, UC Davis Cooperative Extension specialist for beef cattle herd health and production and co-lead of the program, emphasizes that exposure to the full scope of veterinary health careers is part of the point. Livestock medicine isn't companion animal medicine with bigger patients. It's a fundamentally different model, one where the herd is the patient, and the veterinarian's primary role is building conditions for health rather than responding to individual emergencies.

The Students the Program Is Reaching

The early cohorts reflect exactly the population this program was designed to serve. Damien See, a rising senior from Tulare Western High School, came in with dairy experience but left with a confirmed direction toward veterinary school and a specific awareness of the local need he hopes to fill. Graciela Lozano from Mission Oak High School described the experience as eye-opening, crediting it with expanding her understanding of what a career in veterinary medicine could actually look like, including careers she hadn't known existed.

Ezekiel Ceballos, a 2025 program graduate, came from a family where his father actively discouraged him from working in dairy. He's now headed to Cornell University to study animal sciences, with a plan to specialize in dairy cattle reproductive sciences before returning to Tulare as a practicing veterinarian. His framing of why it matters captures something the profession talks about but doesn't always center: trust. Clients are more likely to trust a veterinarian who comes from their community, understands their operation, and has genuine stakes in the region's agricultural future.

Why This Pipeline Model Matters

The veterinary workforce conversation tends to focus on what's happening inside veterinary schools, admissions numbers, debt loads, specialty distribution. FarmVet2B is operating further upstream, at the moment when a teenager either stays on the path or walks away from it.

Maier and Aly have already applied for additional funding to expand the model into a more comprehensive pathway-to-practice initiative, one that would support students from high school through undergraduate study and into veterinary school. The goal is a sustained pipeline, not a one-time intervention.

For a profession that has been sounding alarms about rural large animal access for years, that kind of upstream investment in the next generation of livestock veterinarians is exactly what the conversation has been missing.

TAGS: workforce shortage, large animal medicine, livestock veterinarian, veterinary pipeline, rural veterinary medicine, UC Davis, education, high school, career development, food animal