Episode 37: A Journey from Agricultural Education to Vocation with Madison Philbrick
On this episode of the Maine Farmcast, Dr. Knight sits down with Madison Philbrick, Academic Advisor and Program Coordinator for Animal and Veterinary Sciences in the College of Earth, Health, and Life Sciences at the University of Maine. As a Maine native, Maddy grew up in a coastal community, and worked her way through college earning both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Animal and Veterinary Science. Before transferring to her current role, she served as the J. F. Witter Center Livestock Operations Manager. She is a hard worker and dedicated to helping Maine youth succeed in their academic careers and has a great story to tell. Enjoy the listen!
Episode Resources
- Read Madison’s master’s thesis:
“Unbridled Insights: Exploring Equine Behavior Through GPS Tracking and . . .“
Automated Transcript
Colt Knight: 00:26
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state livestock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And today, I am joined with by Madison Philbrick. She is a University of Maine alum. She got her undergraduate and her master’s degree here at the University of Maine shortly after.
Colt Knight: 00:51
I guess she transitioned directly into being the herdsman for the University of Maine teaching farm, the JF Witter Center. And now she’s just started her new adventure as the undergraduate coordinator for the School of Food and Agriculture. Maddie, it’s great to have you with us.Madison Philbrick: 01:08
Great to be here.
Colt Knight: 01:09
Maddie, I wanted to get your perspective as a student and employee and a native of the state of Maine, kind of about the system, how you got involved in agriculture, how you got involved with the University of Maine, and and how your career path has changed, but it didn’t necessarily start from where you are now. So if you don’t mind, could you tell us a little bit about where you came from?
Madison Philbrick: 01:37
Yeah. So I’m a Maine native. I grew up in Searsport, Maine, little coastal town right next to Belfast. If any of you know where that is, I’ll be surprised. And there, I was in high school, and I was working on a horse farm, actually.
Madison Philbrick: 01:54
And I got it under my hat that I was gonna go be a veterinarian. So I was actually between elementary education and the animal science program when I originally applied to colleges. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, but being a vet sounded cool. So I was headed here. Through that journey, it had a lot of ups and downs.
Madison Philbrick: 02:20
And I, made it through undergrad and undergrad was great here. There’s a lot of hands on experience that you can get. And through that hands on experience, I actually discovered I really liked working with cows. So I came in kind of liked horses, had a little bit of sheep experience, not a whole lot of, really know how in the agriculture community. But through the program here, I really got involved, competed in some of the clubs and different things and was like, this agriculture stuff’s pretty neat.
Madison Philbrick: 02:56
So how do I do it the rest of my life? Got to senior year, saw the vet school application process and really didn’t wanna do another 4 years of the same type of program. And Dr. Knight actually took me under his wing and said, do you wanna do a master’s program? And helped me do that. So through my master’s program, we did some pastured poultry research.
Madison Philbrick: 03:24
And then ultimately, I ended up doing some equine behavior research with GPS collars, which was unique and different and a really good experience. Well, hard to learn how to do it, but it was a really great experience. And yeah. Through that whole time, I was working at the JF Witter Center. I started working as a student employee, just milking the cows whenever there was breaks.
Madison Philbrick: 03:53
Then I got trained on how to feed the cattle, and slowly I got more into a herdsman mentality and was able to start practicing some of those skills. So I was kind of always there. One of the summers between my undergrad and masters, I actually worked on a commercial dairy as well as a herdsman and got a ton of experience on a 500 cow dairy. Really dived in, was breeding cows, was doing herd checks, was health events, all that stuff there. Brought that back in the fall through my master’s program and kind of filled the role as assistant herd manager out there, where I really kind of took ownership of that university herd.
Madison Philbrick: 04:42
Then at one point, our herd manager went on maternity leave, and they needed somebody to take care of those calves. So I became the assistant or the full time manager for a summer. Still wasn’t sure that that was what I wanted to do, but it was a great experience. And, yeah, at the end of my master’s program, the job became available to have a herd another herd manager there. So I did that for a little while, and that’s been great.
Madison Philbrick: 05:14
But I’m excited for my new role.
Colt Knight: 05:16
Yeah. We’re excited to have you here. I first met Maddie. I think she was either a sophomore or a junior. In 2017, I was running a research project on comparing different breeds of pastured broilers, and we were measuring pasture utilization, growth rate, yield rate, water intake, feed utilization, all that kind of fun stuff, seeing if there were heat stress issues with different breeds compared to the others.
Colt Knight: 05:51
It was a very successful project. We generated some of the the first data of its kind for pasture poultry research, and that’s how I, with a beef cattle nutrition degree, got into chickens. That kinda spread across the nation, and I started getting phone calls and emails from newspapers, news organizations, and other universities and producers with questions about pasture poultry, and that’s kind of how the pasture poultry program started here at the University of Maine. Of course, Maine was the broiler capital of the world through about the mid 1970s when the energy crisis started driving, broiler production out of Maine. So Maine has a long history of poultry research.
Colt Knight: 06:37
The building that we’re recording this podcast in now was built in the thirties. This was actually the poultry department for the longest time. So we actually had a 3 story poultry department. If you’re driving throughout Maine and you see a lot of those old 3 story galvanized metal buildings with all the windows, those were actually all the the chicken houses from the fifties sixties seventies, and you’ll see quite a few of those scattered throughout Maine. But, I believe Maddie contacted me because she needed a senior project.
Madison Philbrick: 07:13
I sure did. I needed something to do and wasn’t sure what it was gonna be. And I like chickens, and he was the chicken guy on campus.
Colt Knight: 07:23
So Maddie actually asked us if she could do a pastured chicken project, and we did. We got her some chickens.
Madison Philbrick: 07:32
A hundred of them.
Colt Knight: 07:33
We put her out on pasture with some chicken tractors, and then she had to measure the weight gain every week on those chickens. She had to monitor the daily forage utilization of those chickens, the daily water intake, the daily feed intake, keep environmental records. And then because I wanted her to have the full experience, I sent her to the processor to help with actually processing the birds so she could get an idea of the yield of the animals and and that whole thing, so from start to finish. And she did an amazing job. Usually, undergraduate students lose focus in intense projects like that, so it takes a special person to do real research.
Madison Philbrick: 08:19
I was all by myself too for that project. Every once in a while, I would con another fellow student into helping me weigh birds because a 100 birds getting them through a scale is kind of a lot. But, yeah, it was it was a lot, and it was great experience. And I probably still have a few scars from those chickens to show for it.
Colt Knight: 08:39
Those chickens were delicious, by the way.
Madison Philbrick: 08:41
Yeah. They were good. We had a couple barbecues with them. Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 08:45
We actually, I used to do some poultry seminars throughout the state, and we would we would serve barbecue chicken from the chicken project at those seminars. So it was a good time. Then I was contacted, by the depart by the, College of Agriculture, and they said, hey. We’ve got some residual money from way back when when the poultry association was given money to the University of Maine, to do research that was for graduate assistantships, and there was enough money in there that we could do another poultry research project. And since I was the only one doing any poultry research at the time, they asked me if there was anything that we could use that money for.
Colt Knight: 09:33
And I said, I have a student in mind that might want to get a master’s degree, and I know that she can do some poultry research. So we asked Maddie if she would like to stay on board and earn a master’s degree.
Madison Philbrick: 09:48
I was crazy enough to say yes and do it all over again. So I guess round 1 wasn’t that bad.
Colt Knight: 09:54
And now we’ve already been there and done that on the pasture broiler projects. We’ve got a really good data set on that. We know how long it takes those animals to grow, how what size they’ll be, everything. So I didn’t wanna repeat that work, but I was wondering, what about some pastured turkey projects? And we kinda know the growth rate on turkeys too, so that wouldn’t be anything riveting.
Colt Knight: 10:19
But, inflation was going through the roof. The cost of building materials was just crazy at the time, and we had this idea. What if we designed a mobile rookery system that we built out of cattle panels, tarps, and 2 by fours that would be inexpensive and mobile? And how would that work on pasture turkey production? And, therefore, you know, when we’re done in the summer, we could fold it up and put it away, and then we don’t have to worry about it rotting.
Colt Knight: 10:51
Wood prices at that time were through the roof, so you couldn’t afford just to go buy lumber to build things at that time. So I thought that would be a really good idea, and maybe Maddie can share with you some of the the tribulations we had with that trial. It actually began with getting turkeys.
Madison Philbrick: 11:12
Yeah. Getting turkeys was hard. We went through 2 or 3 different vendors before we were able to find those.
Colt Knight: 11:19
Yeah. The pandemic had basically destroyed the infrastructure on the poultry industry. So it was really tough to get turkeys.
Madison Philbrick: 11:27
So we ended up getting poults that were, I think, 2 weeks old. That way we didn’t have to have them in a brooder situation before they went out on pasture. The day that they arrived, they went straight out on the pasture, which was great to not have that extra time, especially because by the time we got those poults, it was, like, beginning of August. So by the time we had brewed them, put them out on pasture, we would have been too far into snow season here, and it just wouldn’t have worked out great. We were trying to get these birds ready for Thanksgiving, so that was the goal.
Colt Knight: 12:04
That is the the market for pasture raised turkeys is fresh Thanksgiving turkeys for the most part. And they’re quite valuable, but, you know, the problem is it takes 16 to 18 weeks to get those commercial birds up to weight. And then if you have a more heritage breed, they can take up to 28 or 30 months to reach, you know, table size. And even that was a was a was a trial on us because, we had a deal with a local meat processor that she was gonna process the turkeys and keep the turkeys as payment for processing the turkeys. And we were just gonna get the data from them, and that way, we didn’t have to fool with storing and distributing the turkeys and so on and so forth.
Colt Knight: 12:56
But they actually went out of business. They still processed the turkeys. They they were still willing to process the turkeys for us, but they didn’t wanna keep the turkeys. And we had blown our budget due to other unforeseen circumstances of the project, And maybe Maddie could elaborate on a few of those.
Madison Philbrick: 13:17
Yeah. So we built the whole housing structure, the first time, and we did fairly cheaply within budget. And then one night, it was like the 1st week of classes, I was leaving the dairy farm. I had been training some students, in the dairy barn. And it was I had to check on the turkeys before I could go home.
Madison Philbrick: 13:39
So I pull up to the pasture, and the whole thing is collapsed. And I just I honestly didn’t know what to do. I called the farm super superintendent at the time and then I called Colt. And I was like, this whole thing’s collapsed. Like, I don’t know.
Madison Philbrick: 13:54
Like, it’s bad. It’s I don’t have anywhere for these turkeys to be at night. Calm down a little bit. I was tractor trained. I wanna grab the tractor.
Madison Philbrick: 14:03
I was able to get the structure back up for the night. Colt came out the next morning, and we’re like, yeah. This isn’t gonna work anymore. So we had to go buy new materials again to rebuild the structure. So that blew our budget right out of the water.
Madison Philbrick: 14:19
Any money that we did have for processing, we just spent another $600 to replace vent gates and vent cattle panels. So, yeah, it was not a good day. It’s not a good great night at all.
Colt Knight: 14:33
Yeah. We we ended up thinking that that maybe some people had came in there and opened the gates and pushed that structure over. I don’t know if it was a prank or or just mean spirited folks or drunken antics or what. We had to get the police involved. They had to start coming out and monitoring.
Colt Knight: 14:54
We had to put up game cameras and signs and gates. And once we put those game cameras up, it was a whole another world. We there were people walking in and out of that field constantly.
Madison Philbrick: 15:08
Yeah. We had no idea there was so much traffic down there. And, like, I no idea. I drove the farm road, you know, 5 or 6 times a day. And, like, we knew people were out on the trails and stuff.
Madison Philbrick: 15:17
There’s a whole bike path right by that goes right through the farm road, but we didn’t realize they were down in the fields. We didn’t realize that that was an issue. We’d had sheep down there before and not really had any issues, but maybe there were a bunch of people from the public constantly through there. I have so many photos of random people from those game cameras. I have some pretty good ones of Colt too because Keto is make a funny face at me.
Colt Knight: 15:48
Some of the other things that that we had go wrong on that project is we attracted a bear. Yep. And the the bear ate a few turkeys. And then, of course, that’s also a human safety issue having the bear out there. It wasn’t a huge deal.
Colt Knight: 16:01
It was only we only lost 2 or 3 turkeys to the bear. Yeah. Now, a devastating loss that we experienced. And we had these turkeys out on pastures surrounded by a 4 foot electric netting fence.
Madison Philbrick: 16:16
And then it had a perimeter fence as well.
Colt Knight: 16:18
Yeah. And then it had a rigid woven wire perimeter fence around that. So they should have been pretty secure from outside interference, but we had a couple domestic dogs come through and killed a third of the flock Yeah. In just one night.
Madison Philbrick: 16:37
That was, again, not a great morning. Show up to the field, and you could just tell, like, driving up that the birds weren’t right. And then I I found the first one and was like, oh. So then I was trying to frantically count turkeys in the field to figure out how many we were missing, and we just had to start walking to find them too. And it was not great, but we were able to recover them and figure out what had happened.
Colt Knight: 17:03
Yeah. And, unfortunately, between having their house knocked over and dogs coming to eat them, The turkeys got scared, and they wouldn’t live in the rookery that we built that Maddie’s entire master’s thesis was based on testing this design, and they wouldn’t use it because of all the the shenanigans that were happened. So we decided we were gonna scrap this year’s project and repeat the project the following summer. We donated the the turkeys, just to a to a gentleman that that sold Thanksgiving turkeys, and he gave us a bunch that that we all of us farm people and people in the project and the deans and stuff, we all got a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving. But It
Madison Philbrick: 17:49
was delicious.Colt Knight: 17:50
Yeah. They just took the turkeys, and that way, we didn’t have to worry about all that. We were gonna repeat the project. And what happened in the spring the following year, Maddie?
Madison Philbrick: 18:01
Avian flu came through. So, yeah. Avian flu is still a problem to this day. There’s still issues with it in pasture poultry production. But this was the first big outbreak of it.
Madison Philbrick: 18:15
It was ravaging through huge flocks. Out west was losing lots of birds. Like, they were calling
Colt Knight: 18:21
out poultry houses. A 100,000,000 poultry in the United States to Yeah. Bypass avian influenza.
Madison Philbrick: 18:28
It was not not good. So not good for a, for pastured
Colt Knight: 18:33
poultry research either. Well, what really made it bad is our pasture turkeys shared the pasture with the geese Yes. That flew through. It wasn’t it wasn’t unusual to walk out to feed the turkeys or something, and there’d be a 100 geese in the same pasture with the turkeys. And the turkeys intermingled with the geese.
Madison Philbrick: 18:52
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 18:53
And waterfowl are is the primary vector for transmission on that high path avian influenza. And so there was no way anyone was gonna let us raise turkeys outside. And I didn’t wanna raise turkeys indoors because we already know. We already know what it takes to raise turkeys indoors. So we had to pivot on mass Maddie’s project.
Colt Knight: 19:18
Because if you’re not familiar with the way that graduate school works in a science degree, you have to come up with a hypothesis, and then you have to test that hypothesis with a scientific experiment, and then you have to present the results of that experiment to the public and to your graduating committee, and it’s called a defense because you actually have to defend the research that you have done. Now, even if things happen that are outside, you know, your control, like Maddie’s problem with the turkeys, I know folks that have had fires and they lost all their data, You don’t have any data to defend. You cannot earn your master’s degree. We don’t we don’t give them out for sympathy. You you have to to do it.
Colt Knight: 20:15
And we’re like, what can we do? And, Maddie, you wanna tell us what what we ended up doing?
Madison Philbrick: 20:24
So Dr. Knight has worked with GPS collars. That was what his thesis was for his or his Ph.D. program. So he still runs that grazing behavior lab here at the university. So we pivoted to that because we had the resources already available there. And we were able he didn’t wanna do dairy cattle because there’s a lot on dairy cattle already for behavior and such, and technology in that field.
Madison Philbrick: 21:01
We don’t have beef cattle available here at the university to do any northeast type of grazing, but we do have horses. So the horse market is kind of untapped for grazing behavior. There’s a lot of behavioralists in the horse industry, but they haven’t used a monitoring technology. So we took the the data from what’s been done for beef cattle. We’re like, we can do this for horses.
Madison Philbrick: 21:29
Let’s do some grazing detection and behaviors through that. So that’s what I did. We took a low cost GPS unit. We mounted it onto a collar that was a breakaway collar because horses need breakaway things. And, Yeah.
Madison Philbrick: 21:46
Then I was able to make a whole algorithm to pick up different behaviors that we had matched, to the data. And it was really neat. It took a lot of trial and error. Some of the applications that are used for beef cattle don’t work for horses just because they change their behavior in a second versus grazing cattle. They typically they’re grazing or they’re sleeping or they’re, you look at that data a lot differently.
Madison Philbrick: 22:15
So originally, we were looking in large intervals, like 10 minutes. And I was like, this doesn’t work. I can’t tell anything from this data. I actually had to bring it all the way down to one second intervals, which made these files huge. Excel hated me.
Madison Philbrick: 22:31
My computer was a great computer, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and it hated me. But eventually, I was able to get it all to work. And, yeah, then I had to defend it, which coming into grad school, I was the first from my family to he seek a higher degree, such as, like, a master’s or a PhD, and I didn’t know the process at all. I really didn’t know what I got myself into when I when I said, sure, I’ll get a master’s degree. But, yeah, it was a really rewarding experience to then have to, like, go defend that data.
Madison Philbrick: 23:10
And, I mean, writing the paper, all of it was just really great, I guess. And it wasn’t something I had ever seen myself doing.
Colt Knight: 23:23
So, yeah. You you learn a lot of skills earning a master’s degree. And so a master’s degree or at least a science master’s degree, it’s not just taking more classes. It’s not like just going to school for another 2 years. You actually take very few classes compared to your your undergraduate work.
Colt Knight: 23:45
What you’re really learning to do is research, conduct research, reading the literature, understanding the problems, and how to solve those problems. And it’s really a springboard into a multifaceted career instead of a single track career. And there’s a lot of different opportunities for folks with master’s degrees that don’t present themselves to folks that that just have an undergraduate or no college education at all. And I think it’s a very valuable experience. And as Maddie was was talking about, it can be very difficult.
Madison Philbrick: 24:27
Yeah. You
Colt Knight: 24:27
know, because it’s all up to you. You know, as an undergraduate, we’ve got coordinators like Maddie is now and and and guides and and whatnot. No one is holding your hand or telling you what to do in graduate school. So if you do not have the initiative to take take on work on yours on your own, to think for yourself, you’re not gonna make it through the master’s program.
Madison Philbrick: 24:53
Yeah. It’s definitely easy to get lost. I also just personal qualm. I say yes to about everything you asked me to do, and I figure out how to make it happen. So a lot of people, while they’re in graduate school, they teach.
Madison Philbrick: 25:11
But they teach as, a teaching assistant, not as an instructor.
Colt Knight: 25:17
Mhmm.
Madison Philbrick: 25:17
We had a need for an instructor for a course. So I was an instructor for 2 years, which that class was Colt helped me the 1st year a little bit to get the curriculum together. But it was just kinda thrown at me, and I got to make it what I wanted. And it was great, but I was teaching 4 sections of that class. So that meant in the fall, 12 hours of my week was just tied up in delivering that class as well as preparing for it, doing my coursework, trying to get the research stuff done.
Madison Philbrick: 25:54
Yeah. And I was still working out at the teaching farm too. I was feeding cows every weekend and the on call person for when the herd manager needed somebody on the ground faster because I lived 5 minutes away. So yeah. I was really busy all the time, but it was really rewarding.
Madison Philbrick: 26:12
I mean, I rediscovered that I do love teaching. Like I said, I was between elementary education and animal science when I came in. If I told you I did a coin flip to decide between the 2, I might not be too far from the truth. So by getting a master’s degree, it does open up a potential opportunity to teach someday again, in some capacity. And actually, in my program coordinator role, I will be delivering a couple of classes.
Madison Philbrick: 26:42
So I still can do that part that I know I like doing as well as, the program coordination. And I’m still very much involved in agriculture. Now I’m helping the next generation come through and get them on track to graduate and go out into the field.
Colt Knight: 27:00
It’s amazing how hard work builds character in people. And, you know, the folks that that never do any real hard work, it’s sometimes, it’s hard to find character in those those people. The people that experience hardships and they hunker down, they do the work, and and it really makes you a better human being in my experience.
Madison Philbrick: 27:26
Yeah. Especially I mean, my 2nd year too, I threw having a kid into all that craziness too. I was off school, like, maybe two and a half weeks, I think. And then I was right back in it with the baby on my back at these lectures
Colt Knight: 27:41
at Dallas. Imagine, Maddie has a lot of character. Maddie is an outstanding young lady, and we are happy to have her here at the University of Maine. We hope she sticks around a long time, and I may be trying to, trick her into a Ph.D. in the future.
Madison Philbrick: 28:01
I could see a Ph.D. in my future. I just we’ll see if it’s here with you, but, we’ll see. I do see that as a career opportunity. Like I said, I like teaching. Being a professor would have the teaching and research.
Madison Philbrick: 28:17
I didn’t know I liked research until my master’s program. After that broiler project, I was like, yeah. This research stuff’s for the birds. I don’t wanna do that. But like I said, I was crazy enough to say yes for a second time, and I really did see the appeal and the draw for that.
Madison Philbrick: 28:34
So, yeah, that’s what your professors are doing. They’re a huge part of their job is research.
Colt Knight: 28:41
Yeah. Most most folks think that we just smoke a pipe and read under a tree and then teach class a couple times a day, and then we’re off in the summertime. And, that’s usually not how it works. Most most research professors are actually in their lab, out in the field, or writing grants, plus teaching. Plus, we’ve got all these graduate students coming into our office all the time asking questions and wanting help with their project.
Colt Knight: 29:10
So we generally stay quite busy.
Madison Philbrick: 29:13
Yeah. Or they’re in an extension role like you. So
Colt Knight: 29:15
And then you stay doubly busy.
Madison Philbrick: 29:17
Right.
Colt Knight: 29:19
Maddie, it was great having you with us here on the Maine Farmcast. It was great to hear about your journey through agriculture. But I think it’s important to note that, you know, you started off in a family that that was more seafood restaurant oriented, didn’t you, than agriculture?
Madison Philbrick: 29:37
Yeah. So my mom managed a seafood restaurant when I was growing up. My dad, actually, he milked cows on the day I was born, he was milking cows. But, and then he’s been in and out of the ag industry, but we don’t own a farm. They own an acre and a house.
Madison Philbrick: 29:56
I wanted goats when I was in high school for 4-H, and I almost had them convinced, so close. But that was the closest we ever came to farming there.
Colt Knight: 30:05
And and I think it’s important to share these kind of stories because there’s a lot of young people that would like a career or would like to be involved in agriculture or with livestock, but they don’t know that there’s a path for that. So if you don’t grow up in it, how do you get there? And a lot of our students now, their first experience with agriculture and livestock in general is actually college. But we produce a lot of good livestock and agriculturist just from that college experience.
Madison Philbrick: 30:37
Yeah. There’s all kinds of that going on. It is really unique. Like I said, I grew up ag adjacent. I wasn’t directly involved in it a little bit through high school, but we weren’t in it.
Madison Philbrick: 30:47
We weren’t in the, weeds of it. My sister liked horses, but she’s no longer in ag. So, like, we’re not an ag family, but I like ag. I want to be an ag family. Someday, maybe I’ll have my own farm like Colt with his pigs.
Colt Knight: 31:06
And I wanna know what your favorite experience has been since you’ve been here at the University of Maine.
Madison Philbrick: 31:14
That’s a loaded question.
Colt Knight: 31:16
It’s a simple question.
Madison Philbrick: 31:18
No. Just
Colt Knight: 31:18
think back through your 6 or 7 years now and and pick 1. On the spot, without me giving you any heads up.
Madison Philbrick: 31:27
Honestly, the first time I saw a calf be born, her name is Dallas. She’s still at the university herd. That’s the first one I ever witnessed be born, And it was just, it was unique. It was new. I had never seen anything like it.
Madison Philbrick: 31:44
And it really got me, this is what I wanna do. That was when I was like, oh, dairy farming. That could be neat. Let’s explore this. Go a little bit farther than, oh, I just wanna be a vet.
Madison Philbrick: 31:59
Because, yeah, vets, they are on the dairy farm, or they’re in the clinic and they’re working with these animals. But there’s just so much more to the industry that people don’t understand.
Colt Knight: 32:10
Well, I I think most folks that do not grow up around agriculture, they think their only career path towards working with animals is to become a veterinarian. And we see that a lot with our undergraduate classes, especially our freshmen coming in. I usually poll them to see who wants to be a veterinarian, who has an urban versus an ag background. And the majority of our students now are urban students that have no experience with livestock or agriculture that are wanting to become a veterinarian. And this year, I actually asked all the students to write a couple of paragraphs of why they wanna be involved in the animal science or veterinary program, and it’s just that love of animals.
Madison Philbrick: 32:55
Yeah. They just you don’t know how to get in. I didn’t know how to get in either. Like, I didn’t know to go anywhere else. I came here because I loved animals, and I wanted to work with them.
Colt Knight: 33:06
You know? And then, unfortunately, the acceptance rate in the vet school is only gonna be 8% national average. We’re a little higher here at the University of Maine, like 12 or 13% here.
Madison Philbrick: 33:17
We’re actually getting closer to 20, which is neat. But Yeah.
Colt Knight: 33:19
That’s and that’s because of our hands on dairy program for the most part.
Madison Philbrick: 33:23
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 33:24
Because a lot of these students don’t get much hands on experience their first their 4 years in in college. And here, we require the students to go milk cows Yeah. Handle the animals. They’re actually involved more heavily, so they get so they get a little bit better chance, a little bit better shot at getting into vet school. But still, a lot of those students, you know, decide, oh, there’s these other avenues that we can explore and still be involved with with livestock or animals or agriculture.
Colt Knight: 33:54
So I think it’s a it’s a great place to come to not only get an education, but you get life experiences and you learn more perspectives.
Madison Philbrick: 34:05
Yeah. Definitely. That’s a good summary of it.
Colt Knight: 34:10
Patty, it was great having you with us here today. We are gonna sign off. And once again, thanks for listening to the Maine Farmcast. If you have comments, suggestions, or suggested episodes, please email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.
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