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Rural areas across the country struggle to attract and retain food animal veterinarians. States are addressing the problem with financial incentives, youth engagement and post-graduation career support.

Rock County, Nebraska, has 40,000 beef cattle, 1,200 people and no veterinarians.

Until this spring, Dr. Martin Moravec ran a solo practice there, treating family pets and livestock. There were times that just two farm calls could eat up the whole day, what with driving along unpaved roads and over cattle gates.

He tried once to hire a veterinarian to share the work, carefully wording his advertisement to highlight that the position meant lots of time in the outdoors, away from the stress of city life.

Moravec posted the ad to a veterinary college's job board. A few days later, he checked the website and was struck by the two postings sandwiching his, both for companion animal practices. One dangled a $50,000 signing bonus. The other had a signing bonus of $100,000. Moravec's ad offered no financial incentive.

"I got zero response," he said.

Rural areas in every state in the country struggle to attract and retain large animal veterinarians. The reasons are multiple and complex. Livestock practitioners make less money, on average, than their small animal counterparts. They log longer hours. They live in areas that might not have jobs suitable for their spouses. The work takes a physical toll on the body. The relatively isolated nature of the job means fewer mentoring opportunities for new graduates who want them.

Access to large animal care in rural parts of the United States has been a problem for decades, and agricultural and veterinary leaders at federal, state, university and community levels are still trying to solve it. The best-known efforts prioritize student loan repayment or forgiveness. While reducing the burden of student debt is the most tangible way to support livestock veterinarians, the problem persists. In hopes of having a greater impact, some universities are investing in educational, financial and community-oriented support at multiple stages in the career pipeline.

Back in Rock County, Moravec's unsuccessful recruitment attempt means there is no one to take over for him as he prepares to move a few hours away for family reasons. After his prior posting got no bites, Moravec gave up advertising for help. He didn't believe he could compete with urban companion animal practices. 

"That's kind of the nature of the beast for rural practice, at this point," he said.

Economic realities

Among new veterinary school graduates in 2025, the average starting salary for those exclusively in food animal practice was 27% lower than that of their counterparts in companion animal medicine exclusively, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association's 2026 Economic State of the Profession report. The companion animal veterinarians had an average salary of $141,470, compared with $102,973 for food animal veterinarians. These numbers are not adjusted for cost of living, which tends to be lower in rural areas.

The scales tip slightly the other way at the ownership level; the average food animal exclusive practice owner made $203,617 according to the 2025 report, compared to $191,352 for companion animal exclusive practice owners. 

"Veterinarians are not paid based simply on how socially important their work is or how badly a community needs them," Matthew Salois, economist and president of Veterinary Management Groups, told the VIN News Service in an email. "They are paid based on the revenue and economic value their services can generate for the employer or client base. In food animal medicine, that client base is often made up of producers operating in commodity markets with thin margins and limited ability to pass higher veterinary costs along to their customers. That constrains how much practices, farms or institutions can pay, even when the need for veterinary services is real."

Every dollar of compensation counts, especially considering the student debt that most new veterinarians carry. Eight out of 10 veterinary graduates in 2025 had student debt, amounting to $212,499 on average — and much more for some.

For aspiring veterinarians, the financial picture is about to get complicated further. As of July 1, students entering veterinary school will be unable to tap federal educational loans for up to the full cost of attendance, as has been allowed for decades. Their borrowing will be capped at $50,000 per year, and $200,000 in total, which is less than most U.S. veterinary schools' full cost. Students who cannot afford to make up the difference out of pocket may be compelled to take private loans, which typically have more stringent qualifications and repayment rules; or forgo veterinary school altogether.

Moravec said that at some point, debt inevitably drives a person's choice of jobs.

"$130,000 in debt, for me, wasn't enough to make me get a job in a city doing small animal medicine," Moravec said. "But $230,000? If I was coming out [of school] with a quarter of a million dollars in debt, I would seriously consider looking at a small animal job."

That reality is why many public efforts to address care access gaps for livestock are geared to tackle veterinary student debt. These programs offer debt relief as compensation for years served in specified rural locations.

Probably the best-known of these programs is the federal government's Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program (VMLRP), which began making awards in 2010. For 15 years, the VMLRP offered up to $25,000 a year for three years in exchange for an equal amount of time in service. Some recipients have also been able to renew their awards for periods of one to three years for as long as it takes to repay their veterinary school debt. In 2025, the yearly grant amount was raised to $40,000.

According to a program summary, through 2022, the VMLRP made 795 award contracts.

For individual practitioners and the regions they serve, this program has made a marked difference. Moravec was a two-term recipient, and it helped him start his practice, barely four years after graduating from veterinary school in 2008.

Approximately half of the states in the nation have created similar veterinary debt-relief programs, and a handful have pending proposals. Of those that are established, several are relatively new — more than a dozen programs have come online since 2020. The programs vary, but most offer some degree of loan or loan repayment in exchange for a period of service in an area defined as in need.

One of the longest-running state-level programs is run by Kansas State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. Started in 2006, selected students receive a loan of $25,000 per school year. After graduation, one year's loan is forgiven for every year they spend practicing food animal medicine in the state or working in a Kansas county with fewer than 40,000 people.

The program has had documented success during its tenure. It's had 110 participants — 82 graduates and 26 current students. After fulfilling their loan requirements, 94% have continued practicing in a qualifying county, Dr. James Roush, associate dean of academic programs and student success at K-State CVM, told VIN News in an email. 

Despite the program's success, care gaps in rural areas persist. Roush believes it's because the starting salary for veterinarians in Kansas is lower than the national average, even adjusted for cost of living. A 2025 report by the Farm Journal Foundation for the Kansas Department of Agriculture concluded this way:

"The efforts across the country, and within Kansas, have clearly demonstrated there is not one or two simple answers to address the veterinarian shortage. It will take several approaches, programs, and organizations, along with time, to address a problem that has been developing for more than a decade."

Supporting aspiring veterinarians

Some efforts to cultivate future livestock veterinarians aim to support students before veterinary school.

Dr. Hayden Erickson, a new veterinary school graduate who plans to enter equine practice, believes there are veterinary school applicants who would make excellent large animal practitioners but are not accepted into a program.

Three of his friends, all interested in working with large animals, were repeat applicants. One got in on their third try; the other two stopped pursuing veterinary careers.

"It's hard to see some students try to get into vet school who you know would be excellent large animal people," he said.

Erickson isn't the only one concerned about missing out on aspiring veterinarians who potentially could help fill the rural-access gap. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture held "listening sessions" on the rural veterinary workforce last fall, multiple attendees voiced similar concerns.

One was Dr. Debbie Chapman, a mixed animal practitioner in Arizona. She works approximately 160 miles from Phoenix and about 135 miles from Tucson.

Some of her clients drive a long way to see her, and she also goes to them — she has a mobile unit that is on the road three days a week. In an interview, Chapman said she thought schools should better value applicants from rural or agricultural backgrounds, provided they are good students.

"I feel like that's a problem if you've got somebody from a rural area that wants to go back to a rural area — especially that wants to do large animal medicine — and they can't get in."

Multiple universities are trying to cultivate these future practitioners at earlier points in their education.

Back at Kansas State University, the Summer Program for Aspiring Rural Kansas Veterinarians (SPARK) takes five prospective veterinary students annually and invites them to the college to spend the day with the program's food animal and equine clinicians. The participants also receive veterinary school application counseling.

"Typically, the SPARK participants have applied to the DVM program previously and have a strong interest in rural practice," said Dr. Callie Rost, assistant dean for admissions at K-State CVM. "We work with them through application reviews to identify opportunities for improvement and help strengthen their applications for future admission cycles."

A separate K-State CVM program gives a scholarship to incoming veterinary students who express an interest in large animal or mixed animal medicine. The Rural and Underrepresented Scholarship for Hopeful Doctor of Veterinary Medicine Students program, also known as the RUSH DVM scholarship, comes with no service obligation or conditions.

The award is intended to support students underrepresented in veterinary medicine, including those from rural backgrounds. It normally is offered to school applicants along with their acceptance, according to Rost.

Last year, the availability of funding was in question because its source is the federal Higher Education Multicultural Scholars Program. Owing to the federal government's current policies against diversity, equity and inclusion language and programming, Kansas State was uncertain whether the funding would remain intact. In the end, it did, but the school, instead of issuing the scholarships with offers of acceptance, issued them halfway through the students' first year. The delay meant K-State lost the opportunity in 2025 to use the scholarship as a recruitment tool.

At Mississippi State University, the Center for Rural Veterinary Practice, started in 2024, aims to begin outreach early in high school and carry it forward in veterinary school and following graduation.

The center focuses on mixed animal medicine. Program dean, Dr. Nicholas Frank, explained that small animal practice earns more, and accepting small animal clients enables practitioners to serve the large animal community while earning a sustainable wage.

"If we don't do the financial side right, it's not going to happen," Frank said. "You might love cattle, [but] at the end of the day, you've got educational debt, and you've got to feed yourself and your family, and you're not going to be able to just do it out of the love of it. You're going to have to have some sort of financially viable model, and in rural Mississippi, we think this is mixed animal practice."

At the high school level, students will complete lessons and then receive advising, helping them plan for how they'll get into veterinary school. The exact details of the programming are still under development.

Current Mississippi State veterinary students can enroll in a rural veterinary certificate program that focuses on common cases seen in rural medicine and the business aspect of rural practice.

"A lot of the discussion in those cases revolves around the finances, the communication, the challenges," Frank said.

Of the 120 students in the first class to have access to the program, 45 are participating.

Following participants' graduation, the plan is to create a coaching community intended to help the new practitioners, particularly in starting and successfully running their own practices.

Broadening support for new practitioners

Dr. Russ Daly can attest to the value of support for new graduates. The professor and extension veterinarian at South Dakota State University said that before he joined the faculty, he worked in a multi-veterinarian, mixed animal practice in southeastern South Dakota for 15 years. As a new graduate, being the only veterinarian in a rural community can be intimidating, he said. It's like you're in a "fishbowl," because everyone knows who you are.

The attractive thing about working in multi-person practices, he said, is that "you have somebody to bounce things off of, and you have somebody to support your questions and [the] situations you find yourself in."

Lessening the isolation of rural practice is one of the ideas being explored by a working group that is trying to address the care gap in Washington state, according to Dr. Dori Borjesson, dean of the Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine.

The working group, created by the Washington State Legislature in April 2025, is comprised of professionals from academia, state government and the agriculture sector. In a 2025 progress report, the group noted that "new veterinarians typically prefer not to practice alone when they begin their careers, which is more typical of large animal practice as compared to companion animal practice."

Borjesson suggests forming "professional communities." These would be in towns or small cities — outside of major metropolitan areas — that are large enough to sustain a multi-doctor practice and that are within driving distance to smaller rural areas. Such communities would allow for mentorship and collegial in-person relationships, something that's missing in some rural practices, she said.

"Most new graduates are not ready the day they graduate to buy a practice and be a solo veterinarian," Borjesson said. "If they don't have colleagues, a person there, a cohort, it's scary, right? You're a brand new doctor with no mentorship."

"It's not like rural Okanogan County needs 58 vets," she added, referring to a county in northern Washington with a population of 45,000 people. "They just need a couple, and they need them to stay."