6.1 Introduction

Veterinary schools teach students how to diagnose, treat, and manage animal health problems. Students who graduate and enter the workforce adapt those skills to their workplace. Being successful at their jobs and fulfilling their oath as a veterinarian goes beyond helping animals to include managing their businesses successfully. The learning curve for working with O/A farms may be even steeper, considering most veterinary schools do not have a dedicated curriculum for teaching O/A treatments and management. This chapter will offer ideas and suggestions to help you along the way.

Whether you are a practice owner, an associate, or a consultant, expanding your practice management knowledge to include O/A clients will benefit your practice, career, and community. As a prosperous and expanding market, O/A farms offer an area of practice expansion that may be considered niche but may quickly grow into a highly sought-after skill set and specialty for animal health practitioners. This can create a competitive edge for your resume and your practice’s appeal.

Practice management is a broad term that includes everything from record keeping, product purchasing, employee scheduling, marketing, accounting, waste disposal, licensure, workplace safety, and more. While this arena may call to some, it probably wasn’t a reason most of those in animal health chose this path. Regardless of individual interests, practice management impacts veterinary medicine as it directly affects the health of the business and, thus, the ability to help animals.

This chapter will review aspects of practice management focusing on working with O/A clients. Additional resources are included at the end of the chapter. The goal is to provide you with the knowledge and skills to incorporate these clients and animals into your practice.

Veterinarians wear many hats in practice and their personal lives. They can be the investigator, diagnostician, surgeon, bearer of bad news, healer, etc. As such, adaptability is one of the core skills of a veterinarian. What, then, is the veterinarian’s role on O/A farms? This chapter will first examine current veterinary trends on O/A farms to better understand what that could be.

Veterinarians on O/A farms seem either well-integrated or only used in emergencies (Duval et al., 2016; Steneroden, 2021). Larger O/A farms that conduct more intensive farming are more likely to work closely with a veterinarian. Organic and alternative farms that reported greater satisfaction with their veterinarian tended to have one that works with several O/A clients. For O/A farms that did not work with veterinarians regularly, farmers attributed a lack of respect and understanding of their goals as a reason for not seeking veterinary services. Some report that veterinarians are not the “best-qualified health management advisors” and instead seek animal health information from the Internet, social media, and blogs (Duval et al., 2016; Steneroden, 2021). Not being aware of the farmer’s goals and everyday practices can lead to breakdowns in communication, trust, and, ultimately, the working relationship between veterinarian and client. Failure to meet these clients’ needs can lead to missed opportunities for those clients, their animals, and your veterinary practice.