WVC Nashville Is Putting DVMs and Cattle Ranchers in the Same Room on Sunday. It's Never Been Done at a Conference This Size.

If you are a veterinary student interested in food animal medicine, a new graduate considering cattle production consulting, or a practitioner who works with large livestock clients, you need to know about Sunday, August 16th at WVC Nashville.

The DVM and Cattle Producer Track is doing something that, to our knowledge, has never been done at a major national veterinary conference. It is putting veterinarians and working cattle producers in the same room, together, for a conversation about production medicine as both sides actually experience it.

Why This Track Is Different

Panels that bring DVMs and cattle producers together for a frank conversation about production medicine, ranch-level challenges, and the veterinarian-producer relationship have happened before, but at smaller, regional conferences, primarily in Texas. At that scale, you tend to get the same community of practitioners who already know each other. At WVC Nashville, you get a national audience and a national stage.

A panel of DVMs and working cattle ranchers, talking about production medicine the way it actually works on the ground. At a conference this size, it hasn't been done before.

The track is led by two people who know this territory deeply. Dr. Elizabeth Homerosky brings expertise in food animal medicine and the veterinarian-producer interface. Dr. Mark Hilton is one of the most recognized names in cattle production medicine and consulting, with decades of experience working at the intersection of veterinary science and ranch management. Having both in the same room, alongside working producers, is not a standard conference panel. It is a genuine knowledge exchange between the people who make cattle production decisions and the people who advise on them.

What the Conversation Will Actually Cover

Production medicine on a cattle ranch involves problems that veterinary school covers in a clinical framework and ranchers experience in an economic and operational one. A cow that needs treatment is also a cow with a replacement cost, a time-to-market calculation, and a labor constraint attached to it. The decisions a production medicine consultant makes are not purely clinical — they are recommendations that land inside a business, and the best consultants understand how those two worlds connect.

That is what this track is designed to explore. What are the issues that producers most need veterinary guidance on? Where does the producer's experience on the ground diverge from the veterinarian's clinical picture? What does the veterinarian-producer relationship look like when it is working, and what breaks it down? These are not questions that get answered cleanly in a lecture hall. They require both perspectives in the same conversation.

Who This Track Is For

The organizers are direct about the intended audience: veterinary students going into cattle production medicine, practitioners interested in providing consulting services, and DVMs who work with larger livestock clients. That is a focused and often underserved audience at major conferences, which tend to skew heavily toward companion animal content.

For a food animal student, this is the kind of session that helps you understand what the job actually is before you start doing it. Production medicine consulting is not just clinical work scaled up to a herd. It is a relationship business, a communication skill, and an economic advisory function as much as it is veterinary medicine. Hearing from the ranchers you will be working with — in addition to the DVMs who do this work at the highest level — is an education you cannot get from a textbook.

The Larger Picture for Food Animal Medicine

Food animal medicine is one of the most underrepresented career tracks in veterinary education and one of the most consequential in terms of public health, food security, and rural community health. The shortage of food animal practitioners is real, documented, and worsening. Every major veterinary workforce report identifies rural and food animal practice as the area of greatest unmet need.

A session like this one at a national conference is a small but meaningful signal that the profession is taking that gap seriously. It brings food animal medicine to a stage where it can be seen by students who might not have considered it, and it gives the field a platform to make its case directly.

The DVM and Cattle Producer Track runs Sunday, August 16 at WVC Nashville, Music City Center. WVC registration is free for veterinary students. Full information at WVC Nashville

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