TOPEKA — Kansas and the nation face a veterinarian shortage, and state agriculture experts are collaborating to draw more vets to practice in rural areas.

Kansas State University officials are supporting programs that introduce veterinary students to rural lifestyles and gathering data to understand where shortages exist, said Brad White, director of K-State’s Beef Cattle Institute and director of the Veterinary Training Program for Rural Kansas.

The United States has lost about 90% of its food animal veterinarians since the 1940s, according to a 2023 Johns Hopkins study.

But it is challenging to get a handle on specific needs within the state, White said.

About 2,500 licensed vets practice in Kansas, a number that has been steady for a few years, according to a survey published last year by the Farm Journal Foundation and the Kansas Department of Agriculture.

The difficulty is tracking specific areas in Kansas that have veterinary shortages and in what practice areas those shortages are occurring, White said. Veterinarians may have mixed animal practices, meaning they care for large and companion animals, or they may specialize, he said.

In 2020, K-State surveys of veterinarians and producers gathered data about vet practices, but couldn’t define exactly what services were offered or needed in different areas, White said.

“It helped us identify that many producers feel there’s a shortage area, and there’s not an easy mathematical or numerical way to define it,” he said.

In general, the shortage is felt more in rural areas where vets are needed to support ranchers and, ultimately, the food system.

K-State works with other agricultural organizations through the Rural Veterinary Workforce Committee, White said, including the Kansas Department of Agriculture, Kansas Farm Bureau, the Livestock Marketing Association, and the Kansas Veterinary Medical Association.

That group tackles the shortage from various angles, including considering needs to serve agricultural producers, increasing numbers of trained veterinarians, and understanding the needs in different parts of the state, he said.

“We’re more focused on that mixed animal livestock service component because agriculture in general, and livestock specifically, are really important to our rural Kansas,” he said.

Megan Kilgore, executive director at the Kansas Veterinary Medical Association, said other states are considering solutions that include creating a para-professional role that could work with veterinarians, much like nurse practitioners in health care, or doing more veterinary work by telemedicine.

Colorado created a mid-level practitioner position in 2024, which wasn’t widely supported among veterinarians, she said. Many vets also are unsure about telemedicine because, unlike human patients, animals can’t talk and veterinarian work is very hands on, Kilgore said.

At K-State, veterinary students can enroll in a program that introduces them to rural communities, the practices located there and the challenges of working as a veterinarian in those areas, White said.

Nationally, about 12% of graduating veterinary students go into mixed or large animal practices, he said, with most leaning toward companion animal practices.

But at K-State, 25% to 30% of students go into mixed or large animal practices, he said. Part of that is attributable to K-State’s location in an agricultural state, he said, but it is also because of the university’s focus on introducing students to rural options.

“Since about 2012, we’ve really emphasized the additional training for those students and the additional building of their knowledge base to make them comfortable in both selecting the right practice and forming a good cohort as they get to those rural communities,” he said.

Practicing in a rural community can be lonely and professionally isolating, White said, and helping veterinarians connect to others in their field has made a difference.

“The result of that has been that over 95% of them have fulfilled their four-year commitment, which is a good starting point,” he said. “The goal is to keep them there for four years.”

White said 80% of veterinarians in the program continue to practice in Kansas after four years.

Rural living

Justin Welsh, a veterinarian and executive director of food animal technical services at Merck Animal Health, said his company partnered with the Farm Journal Foundation to address vet shortages. Just 3% of graduating veterinarians nationally went into food animal services last year, he said.

Young people who grew up on a farm aren’t returning to the farm as often, he said. Sometimes the farm isn’t big enough to support them or their family sold the farm, and sometimes they want a different lifestyle, Welsh said.

Although programs offering to pay student loans attract veterinarians to rural areas, Welsh said that is a short-term solution. The problem needs to be considered from a larger perspective, he said.

“Human nature, and also some generational factors, have told us or shown us that at some point, for a lot of people, money is not the biggest thing,” he said. “I think long-term the things that we have to address are fitting the person to the environment, and that includes the social aspect of small towns.”

Rural practices may not pay as well as those in the cities, he said. Add in that many young people are looking for better work-life balance than previous generations, and that, too, can make rural practices less attractive, Welsh said.

“They have to be on-call practically all the time. Emergencies are one of the big detractors from rural practice,” Welsh said.

The area rural vets cover can be demanding, with emergencies taking a vet three hours away from home, he said.

“One of the solutions is training people when they can — and it’s not always the case that they can — to bring emergencies to a centralized point,” Welsh said. “That’s one thing that a lot of practices are being designed around.”

Welsh said transparency and immersion help veterinary students know what to expect, rather than recruiting them to rural areas just for them to be surprised by the practice style.

‘Work isn’t everything’

Kilgore said about 80% of veterinarians in Kansas are female, a significant shift from decades past.

Work hours are always a discussion when veterinarians get together, she said, and that increased since COVID because “everybody figured out that work isn’t everything.”

“I think people have decided that family may come first now, and 20 years ago even, family would take a backseat,” she said. “That changes the dynamics of veterinary medicine because most of the females who have gotten into veterinary medicine also want to have families, and committing 24 hours, seven days a week to your clients is tough.”

Kilgore said there are women veterinarians who choose to do that, but the pool is smaller. In rural areas, there are few opportunities to share the work by splitting emergency calls with another veterinarian, she said.

“When we talk about shortage of employees, it’s more a shortage of folks who desire to have that practice type,” she said.

White identified transparency as a way to appeal to K-State students who enroll in the school’s food animal certificate program, which includes preparing them for the lifestyle, time, finances and business acumen needed to be successful as a solo practitioner.

“It provides those students with skills and aptitudes for food animal medicine that will help them be successful early on, which helps lead to retention,” White said. “Because one of the reasons you leave a job is ‘I don’t feel like I can do this job.’”

The food animal certificate costs nothing for veterinary students but gives them a pathway to explore that type of medicine, he said. In classes of 120 vet students, about 30 to 35 per class enroll in it, he said.

“We’ve actually had out-of-state people come here because of that food animal certificate program, and some of those have ended up staying in Kansas,” White said.