Ohio State's College of Veterinary Medicine brought 62 high school students to campus and working dairies this summer for hands-on large animal rotations, equine clinical skills, food animal medicine, biosecurity protocols, injection technique, before those students had picked a college or a major.
The decision, and what it cost to get there
The Protect OHIO initiative partnered with Ohio Farm Bureau to plan and deliver two ExploreAg sessions in June and July 2026, one at the vet college campus and one at MVP Dairy's facility in Celina. ExploreAg is Ohio Farm Bureau's agriculture literacy and workforce development program; Protect OHIO is the college's rural veterinary workforce initiative. Students toured the Veterinary Medical Center, learned vet school admissions pathways, worked with rumen-cannulated cattle, practiced injections, observed a state-of-the-art milking carousel, and rotated through newborn calf care and health record management with current vet students, faculty, and staff.
The June session ran at Ohio State's vet college. The July session ran at a working dairy, where students saw the veterinarian's role in the milking parlor and on the production floor. Both sessions were built to expose students to large animal medicine before they commit to a college major.
Who this squeezes, and who it helps
If the model works, it changes the timeline every other pipeline intervention is working on. Moving the recruitment window back to high school, before the debt, before the declared major, before the student has spent years shadowing at a suburban small animal clinic, means you're competing for attention at a completely different decision point.
For rural and mixed practices trying to hire, this is either very good news on a long horizon or a signal that the near-term relief market isn't improving. If Ohio State and other land-grant colleges formalize high school outreach, you might see more new grads willing to consider food animal work in the next decade. The timeline from high school to practicing DVM is long enough that near-term hiring gets no help from this.
For current large animal and mixed associates, more students choosing the track could eventually mean more colleagues in markets that have been solo by necessity, not choice.
The desk's read on whether it works
The fact that Ohio State is investing in formalized high school programming tells you that the college believes the existing pipeline isn't solving the large animal shortage fast enough. That's our read too.
Whether this specific intervention works is a different question, and we won't know for years. Sixty-two students over two sessions is early-stage, not a solved problem. The program's success depends on whether those students actually choose large animal tracks when they get to vet school, and whether they stay in large animal practice after graduation, and neither of those is guaranteed by a good day at a dairy in July. The students who self-select into an agriculture literacy program are likely already more interested in the work than the average high schooler, so the conversion rate will look better than it would on a random sample.
What we can say now: if you're at a land-grant vet college and you're not running something like this, you're watching a peer institution test a model you'll eventually need to answer. And if you're a rural practice owner counting on the pipeline to improve soon, this program's timeline should recalibrate your expectations.
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What it means if the model spreads
If other vet schools formalize high school partnerships, and some will, because the rural workforce conversation is live at every land-grant college, it changes the undergraduate advising landscape. Pre-vet advisors will start asking students about large animal exposure earlier. High school career counselors in rural districts will add vet medicine to the list of paths worth exploring before college. And vet schools will have concrete workforce development programs to point to when they talk to state legislatures about funding.
None of that fixes the associate DVM's loan balance or the owner-DVM's succession problem in 2027. But it does mean that the profession is moving the intervention point earlier than it has before, and that the institutions running vet schools believe the existing post-graduation incentives aren't closing the gap.
The students who went through ExploreAg this summer are high schoolers. The timeline from high school to practicing DVM means this program's impact is years out.