No Vet for a Hundred Miles: Montana's Livestock Doctors Are Disappearing

On a January morning so cold the thermometer outside his barn read minus eighteen, a rancher north of Jordan watched one of his pregnant heifers go into a difficult labor. He knew within minutes that he needed professional help. The nearest large animal veterinarian with an open schedule was in Miles City — roughly 115 miles away on roads that had not been plowed since the previous afternoon.

He managed the delivery himself, losing the calf. The heifer survived.

"You learn to do things you were never trained to do," he said, speaking by phone from his kitchen a week later. "You don't have a choice."

That improvised resourcefulness, born of necessity rather than preference, is becoming a defining feature of agricultural life across wide stretches of Montana. The state's large animal veterinary workforce is aging rapidly, rural practices are struggling to attract graduates from professional schools, and the consequences are falling hardest on the ranchers who can least afford them.

A Workforce in Decline

Montana is among the states most acutely affected by what the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges has identified as a national shortage of food animal practitioners. The organization has tracked the trend for more than a decade, noting that fewer than fifteen percent of veterinary school graduates now pursue large animal practice — a figure that has declined steadily as urban companion animal clinics offer higher salaries, more predictable hours, and far less physical risk.

The Montana Department of Livestock does not publish a county-by-county map of veterinary coverage gaps, but conversations with ranchers, county extension agents, and the practitioners themselves paint a consistent picture. In Phillips, Garfield, McCone, and Powder River counties — among the most sparsely populated in the contiguous United States — the situation has moved from concerning to critical.

Dr. Renata Schilling has operated a mixed large animal practice out of Lewistown for twenty-three years. She is sixty-one years old. Her nearest colleague who handles cattle obstetrics is forty miles away, and that practitioner is fifty-eight. Neither has a partner or an associate.

"I have tried to hire," Schilling said, seated at the small desk in her clinic's back office between calls. "I have advertised. I have called veterinary schools. I have offered loan repayment assistance out of my own income. The candidates I do hear from want to know about on-call frequency and whether I have an electronic records system. Those are reasonable questions. But they are not questions that fit this practice."

The on-call reality she describes is relentless. Large animal emergencies do not observe business hours. Difficult calvings, colic episodes in horses, respiratory illness sweeping through a feedlot — these crises arrive at two in the morning in the middle of a February blizzard with the same indifference they arrive on a warm Tuesday afternoon. Schilling estimates she averaged four hours of uninterrupted sleep per night during the last calving season.

Economic Consequences Beyond the Ranch

The shortage carries costs that extend well beyond individual ranching operations. Livestock producers in Montana contribute an estimated four billion dollars annually to the state economy, and the health of that industry depends on timely veterinary intervention at multiple stages — pregnancy diagnosis, vaccination programs, treatment of infectious disease, and regulatory inspection for interstate cattle sales.

When a herd health program breaks down because a veterinarian cannot be reached in time, the losses compound. A respiratory illness left untreated for forty-eight hours because the nearest vet is fully booked can move through a calf pen with devastating speed. A pregnancy check delayed by weeks shifts breeding schedules, disrupts marketing timelines, and ultimately reduces the revenue a family operation depends on to survive the winter.

County extension offices across central and eastern Montana report increasing requests from ranchers seeking guidance on procedures traditionally performed by licensed veterinarians. Extension agents are careful to note the legal and practical limits of what they can advise, but the volume of those requests reflects a gap that formal veterinary services are no longer filling.

The Practitioners Still Standing

Dr. Marcus Thill drives somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 miles each year across a service territory that covers portions of three counties in northeastern Montana. He graduated from Colorado State University's veterinary program eleven years ago, returned to the region where he grew up, and has watched two colleagues retire without replacement during that period.

Thill is thirty-eight. He is widely regarded as one of the most skilled large animal practitioners in the region. He is also, by his own assessment, exhausted in a way that does not fully resolve even after a full night's sleep.

"I chose this. I want to be clear about that," he said, parked in his truck outside a ranch southeast of Glasgow while waiting for an antibiotic to take effect in a steer with a respiratory infection. "But there are mornings when I look at my call log and I think — if I got hurt today, if I had to stop for six months, what would happen to the people who depend on me? There is no backup. There is no one to call."

His concern is not hypothetical. In 2022, a large animal veterinarian in the Judith Basin area suffered a serious shoulder injury during a difficult calving procedure. It took the region more than fourteen months to restore anything approaching adequate coverage. During that period, ranchers reported driving to Billings — a round trip of more than two hundred miles from some locations — for routine pregnancy checks.

Policy Responses and Their Limits

The Montana Legislature has periodically considered measures to address the shortage, including expanded loan forgiveness programs for veterinarians who commit to rural practice and proposals to broaden the scope of practice for veterinary technicians in underserved areas. Neither approach has advanced far enough to produce measurable change on the ground.

The federal Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program, administered through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, does provide assistance to practitioners who commit to working in designated shortage areas. Montana has several such designated counties. But practitioners and advocates note that the program's funding levels are insufficient to address the scale of the problem, and that loan repayment assistance alone does not resolve the quality-of-life factors that deter graduates from choosing rural practice.

Some veterinary schools have experimented with rural practice rotations designed to expose students to large animal work before they make career decisions. Montana State University's extension service has partnered with Colorado State on outreach efforts targeting students with agricultural backgrounds. Results have been modest.

A Generation's Reckoning

For the ranchers navigating this shortage day to day, policy discussions in Helena or Washington feel distant from the immediate reality of a sick animal and no one to call.

The rancher north of Jordan — who asked not to be identified by name, concerned about appearing to complain when neighbors face the same hardships — said he has begun keeping a more extensive supply of medications and instruments on hand than he once thought appropriate for a layperson. He has watched online tutorials. He has called Dr. Thill at midnight for telephone guidance on procedures he was performing for the first time.

"We are a resourceful people out here. Always have been," he said. "But there is a difference between being resourceful and being abandoned. I am not sure everyone in the capital understands which one this is."