Last year, The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry announced a partnership with the Farm Journal Foundation to address Oklahoma’s rural large animal and food animal veterinary shortage.
In collaboration with agriculture industry stakeholders, Oklahoma Secretary of Agriculture Blayne Arthur’s goal was to assess the state’s specific challenges in creating a stronger, more vibrant veterinary workforce program that supports practitioners, farmers, and rural economic development.
Farm Director KC Sheperd attended the Rural Veterinarian Shortage Summit today and had the opportunity to speak with OSU President Dr. Jim Hess about the collaborative efforts to find solutions.
Dr. Hess has been working on the issue for nearly three years and expressed gratitude for the creation of the Oklahoma Veterinary Medicine Authority by the Oklahoma state legislature two years ago. He said, “They’ve been gracious enough to give us funding to be able to add faculty, and of course, we have now have a legislative request for a significant amount of funding to be able to build the animal teaching hospital that we desperately need as our facilities are aged and it is affecting our ability to recruit faculty and students both, as well as our ability to place large animal and food animal vets in rural Oklahoma.”
As the current legislative session is winding down to its last 28 days, Dr. Hess is confident that legislators can see the importance of agriculture to the state’s economy and the effect that the health of the veterinary teaching hospital has on it.
“We’ve been gratified by their interest in our situation and their willingness to help us address it,” he said. He explained further that there are only 33 vet schools in the United States, which creates a lot of competition for recruiting quality faculty members, as their work environment is critically important. Conversely, the same applies to students considering which of the schools to attend. Currently, 106 students per year are admitted to the OSU School of Veterinary Medicine.
“Our focus is on trying to attract people from rural Oklahoma, train them, and get them back to rural Oklahoma, and we take that mission very seriously,” Dr. Hess explained. “Part of our legislative efforts in the past have been to provide scholarships for students who will commit to practicing large animal or food animal veterinary medicine in a rural area.”
Eight such scholarships were awarded in the fall of 2024, and more are ready to be granted this fall. “We are very appreciative of our legislative team members who have provided that support. It is absolutely critical for a rural veterinarian not to have much debt,” Dr. Hess added.
He described the situation as “a once-in-a-multigenerational opportunity” to restore the 43-year-old glory that it deserves and once held. He said, “If our legislative program with our partners at the Capitol comes to fruition, we will have one of the very best veterinary teaching hospitals in the United States.”
Beyond improvements to the veterinary hospital, President Hess aims to secure funding to provide scholarships for all OSU Students. He stated, “The cost of higher education has continued to escalate, not just in Oklahoma, but across the nation, due to mandatory cost increases and the cost of operating the facilities. My focus, in addition to vet med, is going to be in raising private scholarship money. What we really want is for our students to leave the university with the least amount of debt possible, because that will make a big difference in their quality of life.”
He noted how students nowadays are leaving universities across the nation with so much student debt that it equates to an additional house payment for them. He pointed out that reducing that load on the students would double as an economic driver, as students leaving college with less debt will be economic drivers in possession of spendable, disposable income.
“It’s not just critical for them, personally, it is critical for our economy as well,” he concluded.
