Participants in the AASV Participant-Led, Early-Career Swine Veterinarian Development Program met in Nashville, Tennessee Friday, February 23, 2024, immediately before the AASV Annual Meeting. As selected by the program participants, the topic was “Economic problem-solving tools for business and personal financial decisions” presented by Dr Derald Holtkamp.
In September, participants had a unique opportunity to visit the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas. The $1.25 billion, 574,000-ft2 facility will safely and securely support the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) mission to protect livestock from foreign, emerging, and zoonotic diseases. After learning about research priorities, foreign animal disease diagnostic services, and completion progress, participants toured biosafety
level (BSL)-2, -3, and -4 livestock containment spaces, the Biologics Development Module, and supporting infrastructure.
One participant said, “Getting to see inside the NBAF facility was likely a oncein- a-lifetime opportunity, so I greatly appreciate being able to see behind the scenes into what USDA works on when we talk about foreign animal diseases,” while others were impressed with the extraordinary level of biosecurity. The AASV Board of Directors toured NBAF in August 2023 and shared their impressions in the November/December issue of the Journal of Swine Health and Production.
The following day, early career participants were joined by Kansas State University swine nutrition experts Drs
Jordan Gebhardt, Robert Goodband, Mike Tokach, and Katelyn Gaffield. Participants enjoyed an interactive discussion
about nutrition and non-infectious disease management.
The sixth and final individual module will be held this winter. The program will end with an early-career preconference seminar, “Be the Pig’s Champion with Effective Herd Visits,” at the 2025 AASV Annual Meeting in San Francisco on Sunday, March 2. All annual meeting attendees are eligible to register for the preconference seminar.
The goal of the AASV Participant-Led Early-Career Swine Veterinarian Development Program, funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Veterinary Services Grant Program, is to create a practitioner-led, earlycareer swine veterinarian development program to provide participants with resources needed to encourage and ensure successful, lifelong careers as swine veterinarians and to cultivate new leaders in swine veterinary medicine. This program is free to selected participants. Participants attending modules in person receive a $500 stipend per module to offset travel, lodging, and any other costs associated with participation in this program. The current program runs through July 2025.
AASV hopes to to offer this program to another cohort of early career swine veterinarians in the future. Learn more about the program at https://www.aasv.org/earlycareerdevelopmentprogram/.