Farm Animal Care
Medical Services
Whether you have farmyard pets or production animals, illness in even one of them is stressful. We provide thorough examinations and diagnostic testing of both the individual and the herd to find you an answer and get your animals back on track. By partnering with you, we can develop a herd health plan to help prevent the issues your farm commonly sees. It is our goal to prevent diseases, minimizing the number of emergency or medical calls your farm needs. All our medical services are on-farm, to save you the hassle and your animals the stress of transport.
We’re not going to try and pretend we’re specialists – we’re general practitioners who have taken some advanced courses – but we do spend lots of time consulting with specialists on your behalf to get an answer without you having to travel. Thanks to advances in Telemedicine, we can have results and recommendations from specialists quickly – often within 24 hours and sooner.
Heard Health, Vaccinations, medicaiton & parasite prevention
If you’re using your veterinarian only when an animal is sick, you are not using your veterinarian right. We are happy to offer herd health programs as an investment to prevent losses due to diseases, rather than being an expense once things are going wrong.
Regular herd health consultations provide a solid baseline of good animal health and welfare, which in return leads to greater profits from production animals. Our veterinarians can assess the health of your herd as a whole, including recommendations for environmental changes that can improve health and production. We can recommend an appropriate vaccination and deworming protocol to help keep your reproduction levels up and weaning weights high. A herd health consult will also include recommendations for first-line treatment of certain illnesses that may arise in the future. Health Canada has new requirements for the sale of prescription medications to farmers, and regular herd health consultations allow us to provide prescription medications to use on-farm as needed.
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure – and with good reason. Many diseases in livestock can have severe, if not fatal, consequences. We’re happy to help develop a preventative vaccine program tailored to your farm. Which diseases your livestock is likely to be exposed to depends on what activities you do together, where you travel, and what we are seeing in the area for diseases.
Did you know that deworming protocols have changed because of growing resistance to de-worming medication? Today, we need to utilize fecal egg counts to determine not only which horse is shedding the most worms but also which worms are present and whether there is resistance developing. Using the wrong deworming program is at best a waste of money on an unnecessary medication. At worst, it can mean reproductive loss, death, and loss of vital farm income.
Reproductive Services
Reproductive efficiency is one of the most important parts of your herd’s success. Ensuring you aren’t feeding animals that are not able to produce is integral to maximizing your farm’s profitability. Making sure each spring that your bulls can get their job done is arguably even more important – finding out the majority of your cows are open in the fall is a costly way to learn you have a sub-fertile or infertile bull. Changes in an animal’s productivity can occur suddenly and at any time, and your bottom line relies on reproductive success, which is why annual testing is essential to maximizing your returns.
Diagnostic Testing
When your herd starts falling ill, proper diagnostic testing and timely results are essential to minimizing losses and maximizing productivity and welfare. Using a combination of comprehensive in-house blood and fluid analysis, on-farm post-mortem diagnosis, along with the skills and knowledge of board-certified Veterinary Pathologists from referral laboratories, we can get to the bottom of your problem quickly. We can refer samples to four different specialty labs, each with their own area of expertise, so you can rest easy knowing truly expert minds are finding you an answer.
Diagnostic Imaging
A proper diagnosis is the only way to be able to develop a plan to keep it from happening again. If your animal is lame or has issues with its teeth we are happy to provide on-farm high-definition digital x-rays. For smaller farm animals, such as alpacas or small goats, we are also able to X-ray the chest and abdomen, to help find an answer if respiratory or gastrointestinal disease is the issue.
Our mobile ultrasound unit rounds out our imaging by letting us look for muscle and tendon injuries that don’t show on x-ray. Having a high quality ultrasound with doppler is integral to our ability to fully diagnose why your animal is lame, or evaluate reproductive status. Pregnancy diagnosis by ultrasound can be done earlier, and can be more accurate, than pregnancy diagnosis by palpation. By investing in an in-clinic ultrasound with doppler, and advanced training with our ultrasound, we have rounded out what digital radiographs can’t do. We can also utilize telemedicine for specialists to read any images that we can’t.
Surgery & Anesthesia
Whether you want to minimize production losses because of the pain of a procedure or are simply unfamiliar with the proper way to perform the surgery, we are able to help on farm.
We offer a range of on-farm elective surgeries including castrations and dehorning (including cosmetic). As with all our farm animal surgeries, we always include pain medication as well as local anesthesia (freezing). This not only ensures better animal welfare but for commercial producers, it also minimizes production losses due to pain and inflammation, giving you greater profitability. Our on farm elective procedures are all performed using proper sterile technique to minimize post surgery complications.
Accidents happen. When lacerations happen, time is of the essence – timely repair speeds healing, reduces the chance of infection, and minimizes formation of scar tissue – all of which are important for proper return to function. Laceration repair is typically performed with standing sedation and local anesthesia (freezing).
We understand that sometimes, poultry can be more than just production animals – particularly on small homesteads and in urban flocks, poultry can be pets too. For such birds, owners often wish to do more than just cull the sick ones. Impacted crops are a common cause of individual mortality in poultry flocks. We provide surgical repair of impacted crops, utilizing sedation and local freezing for anesthetic.
Dentistry, Tusk & Hoof Care
Think dentistry is for pets and horses? Sometimes the reason an animal is losing weight or drops in production is simply a sore tooth that needs to be pulled. Our on farm dental radiographs gives us an answer right away, ensuring we only treat what needs to be treated and don’t pull the wrong tooth.
We are happy to offer on-premise hoof and tusk trims for pigs, llamas and other animals that need. We provide sedation for difficult animals to minimize stress and increase the safety of the procedure.
End of Life Care
Saying good-bye to a companion is hard. We understand that while we can never make “good-bye” easy, we can make it a little better by providing the service on-farm. Sometimes we need to ease the suffering of an animal and we are here to help you during those tough times.
To make things easier we give a sedative prior to euthanasia so that they are relaxed and feel more comfortable throughout the procedure. Once the sedative has taken effect, we give the euthanizing drug which is essentially an overdose of general anesthetic – your animal gently and painlessly falls asleep and passes away very quickly. When an animal is euthanized this way, they do need to be buried to prevent other animals from ingesting the euthanasia drugs. For those times when burial isn’t an option, we can offer alternatives that don’t require burial and are just as humane.