Reaching back…

My name is Sierra Guynn, I am a veterinarian currently teaching, researching, and practicing at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Though today I can’t imagine working in any other field, I found my way to agriculture haphazardly. After 5 years of graduate school, where an inordinate amount of my time was spent reading, writing, researching and experimenting, all I wanted to do when I started vet school was “work with animals”. I was disappointed to spend the majority of my first year of vet school in a lab with animal specimens, rather than with live animals. Fortunately for me, there are many student organizations to explore different opportunities in veterinary medicine. One of these groups, the Food Animal Practitioner’s Club (FAPC), and a classmate of mine – Lesley Davis (now Dr. Lesley Davis)- are the two reasons I am now in agriculture as a food animal veterinarian.

The FAPC organizes Saturday morning rectal palpation practice at 8 A.M. for club members, even to this day. Palpation is a difficult skill to learn and takes an extraordinary amount of practice on live animals. My drive to work with live animals was so strong that as a first-year vet student, who had never even touched a cow previously, I signed up for the club and for palpation practice. There I was, on the second Saturday of vet school, with my arm up the dirty end of a teaching herd Holstein. This experience ignited a passion for ruminant physiology that I still have today. The rumen is an entire universe inside the bovine; without harmony and balance in that universe, there is no bovine. However, simply learning ruminant physiology does not make someone “a cow doctor”. And this is where Lesley stepped in.

Lesley’s depth of knowledge and hands-on experiences with livestock matched my physiology education in the laboratory and field. Her family had a commercial beef herd, a poultry house, and she was an active participant in 4H with market livestock showing and tractor operation. I had a PhD in physiology, but Lesley had talked a perfect score of 50 in oral reasons for market steers her senior year of high school. As unlikely a pair as we may have seemed, we spent the next 3 years working together and helping each other successfully finish veterinary school. I tutored her in physiology and biochemistry, she tutored me in livestock handling and making hay, and together we suffered- oh sorry, I meant supported each other– through anatomy and small animal classes. And today, we are both successful food animal veterinarians in Virginia!

Unfortunately, agriculture in the United States has reached a point of crisis. Less than 1% of Americans produce the food the rest of the populations eats, including grains, fruit and vegetables, dairy products, or meat products. Physically consuming a product, or feeding a product to your infant, is the most intimate relationship that a human can have with an inanimate object. For humans, health is predicated on the consumption of safe and nutritious food. The production of healthy food begins with the farmer or producer, whose work is often not appreciated or even acknowledged by the population whose lives depend on them.

Being a part of VALOR is important to my growth as a veterinarian and educator for a few reasons. First, I need to learn about the other aspects of agriculture that I know little about, such as crop farming, the economics of agriculture, and agriculture policy. If I better understand the business of livestock production, I can be more helpful to producers when we are managing the health of their livestock together. Second, I want to assist the livestock industry and producers to get the respect and financial benefits that they deserve for feeding our communities. Finally, I want to share with members of the agricultural industry how important it is to “reach back” to those of us who did not grow up in agriculture but are willing to invest and learn. If all levels of the agriculture industry provide opportunities for those interested to gain knowledge, experience, and understanding, we will be able to grow an appreciation for agriculture that spreads outwards from our industry to society as a whole.

I know that there were days that Lesley thought, “geesh, what an idiot,” but without her time, patience, and willingness to share what she knew, I wouldn’t be a food animal veterinarian. Without the resources available at the veterinary school to provide an excellent education in food animals, and the support of student organizations like FAPC, I wouldn’t be a food animal veterinarian. Without assistance from those “born into agriculture”, there will not be enough food animal veterinarians to do their part in providing care to the livestock and producers that ensure safe and nutritious dairy and meat products for everyone.