New position aims to close the gap in Virginia's large animal veterinary services
Thach Winslow ’86, DVM ’91 has spent 35 years learning every version of the same problem. On April 1, he started the job that puts all of it to work.
Winslow is the first Coordinator to Support Virginia's Large Animal Veterinary Workforce, based in the Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.
The position — grown from a collaboration among the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, Virginia Cooperative Extension, and the Virginia Farm Bureau — was created to address a gap that a 2024 Farm Bureau survey made impossible to ignore: Only 52 percent of Virginia's livestock producers said they were receiving adequate veterinary care.
“Dr. Winslow has thorough knowledge of producer needs, challenges and opportunities of large animal practitioners, opportunities for students, Virginia Cooperative Extension, and workings of the state veterinary office,” said Chris Byron, head of the Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences at the veterinary college.,“He brings a unique knowledge base and an extensive network, which will allow us to get to work right away and make an impact.”
Byron said the goals of the position within the next three years include helping students feel more connected to large animal positions in Virginia; developing more access for students to a network of veterinarians; making exploration of career opportunities more accessible to students; identifying funding to develop large animal veterinary programs; and gaining more timely and relative feedback from large animal veterinarians and producers on the veterinary college’s programs.
Fully Extension-focused, the role will keep Winslow off campus and on the back roads of Virginia most of the time — talking to the livestock producers, veterinarians and other stakeholders who live with the problems every day.
“We have been all too aware of the current and future veterinary access problems faced by large animal owners and producers in Virginia," Byron said. "This position will be a powerful tool to help identify sustainable solutions to these issues and facilitate impactful change”
The man hired for this position has been preparing for it, in ways he couldn't have planned, his whole career.
Half the farmers can't get a vet
The economics are simple and brutal.
A veterinarian drives an hour on mountain roads to reach a farm. The handling facilities are poor, so a procedure that should take 30 minutes takes 90. The bill exceeds the value of the animal. The veterinarian can only make so many visits in a day. The farmer can only afford so much. And somewhere in that math, a veterinarian decides this is not a career that pencils out, and a community loses another practitioner it cannot replace.
"Hourly is hourly," Winslow said. "There are only so many hours in a day."
But he pushes on the word that everyone uses to describe the situation.
"There is what is termed a shortage of large animal veterinarians," he said. "I would like to refine that. There is a shortage of large animal veterinary services. Can we establish tools to make existing veterinarians more efficient?"
That single question reshapes the entire conversation.
A state working group spent two years studying the shortage before Winslow was hired. Their recommendations led to a grant program, signed into law in 2025, that has already put $890,000 into the hands of seven large animal veterinarians across Virginia to establish or expand their practices. Winslow's job is to go further.
A stockbroker's son on a tractor
Winslow grew up in Essex, Massachusetts, a lobstering town on the North Shore where his father went to work in a coat and tie and came home and climbed on the tractor. At fourteen, he went to summer camp in Wyoming and spent the next decade going back, on the ranch through high school and college. His mother, he said, considers it the greatest thing they ever did and the worst, because they hardly saw him again.
After a year and a half at the University of Vermont and three years at Virginia Tech earning an Animal Sciences degree, he had a plan fully mapped: work a year on a Colorado ranch, establish residency, enter Colorado State University's veterinary program, and open a practice out west. He had the ranch job lined up and was spending his last summer working with a veterinarian in Wyoming when the oil crash gutted the state's economy. Businesses that had been running for forty years shuttered in Cody. Winslow decided he would not stake his future on something he couldn't control.
He went back to Virginia instead, worked at McDonald Farms in Blacksburg to establish residency, and applied to the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. He entered with no interest in anything but large animal medicine, struggled through the foundational sciences on determination more than memorization, and graduated in 1991 with the Frank P. Andrews Food Animal Scholar Award, the college's highest honor for food animal students.
Build, lose someone, rebuild
Winslow opened Bold Springs Veterinary Service in June 1991, fresh out of the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, as a solo practice in Blacksburg, large animal only. By February, the business had gone from debt to profit.
In April, he was caught in a flash flood and pinned underwater. He barely survived. He scraped together what was left and kept going.
By year three, he was working 18-hour days. He hired an associate, then another, but both left — one to start his own practice, another when his wife got a job out of state. He brought on a part-time retiree from the veterinary school and added an equine vet, but what he really needed was someone who could work on cattle. After 17 years, the cycle never really stopped: build, lose someone, rebuild.
His shoulders were giving out. He had a daughter in college, another not far behind, and the economy was heading into a recession. A large animal vet with no interest in small animal practice and no real exit strategy.
Then Gary Umberger called from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, telling him a position was opening. Winslow's first response involved words he would not repeat in print. He wanted nothing to do with state government. Umberger called back two weeks later. Winslow still hadn't thought about it. But the position only opened every 15 or 20 years. His body was breaking down. His clients needed someone. He made sure his associate would buy the practice and keep his employees, then he applied.
His dream, from the beginning, had been to be the local large animal veterinarian. The one who was out there for people. The practice sat three and a half miles from the veterinary college, and students had lined up to rotate through. What stuck with him most were not the scheduled visits but the calls that came at 2 a.m.
"Those are the ones where I made a difference," he said. "Not always for the animal. Often for the person."
Every version of the problem
That was 2007. What followed handed Winslow a different piece of the puzzle he would eventually be hired to solve.
Five years with VDACS. Foreign animal disease response. Training at the federal lab on Plum Island. The politics of quarantine. His mentor, Umberger, taught him one of the most useful things he has ever learned: No one is capable of listening until they are done talking.
Six years as Wyoming's assistant state veterinarian. One of only three states with active brucellosis, his office covered the whole state with only four staff members. Not a single day in his tenure went by without a herd under quarantine.
Then Elanco Animal Health. The industry side.
Then Haiti.
In Haiti, the familiar tools of veterinary medicine simply did not exist. No reliable electricity. No refrigeration. No infrastructure. Winslow was teaching animal science at a university running on a USAID grant, running clinics for communities where a single goat was a family's savings account, and learning what happens when the gap between what animals need and what people can provide becomes absolute.
"It's a very similar problem to part of why we have a shortage in rural America," he said. "When you don't have the facilities, it's hard to get anything done."
The hard questions
He talks about the challenge in three time frames: short-term fixes for the veterinarians already out there, medium-term work with students currently in the college, and long-term investment in the pipeline of young people who might choose this career in the first place.
The short-term work is practical: Loan relief and shared-use haul-in facilities, so animals come to the vet instead of the vet driving to the animal.
The medium-term work starts with listening. Winslow wants to survey current students before he assumes he knows what they want.
"I'm not going to pretend I know," he said. "What are you willing to do? What do you not want to do? If I don't know that, I don't know what we need to do at the start."
The long-term work is where he gets blunt. Many students entering veterinary medicine today have said they will not work more than 40 hours a week, will not work nights, and will not work weekends. In large animal practice, that rules you out. There is no large animal emergency clinic to take the after-hours call. If you are the vet, you are the system.
And he is honest about what he does not yet know.
"Are we just going to subsidize it?" he asked. "You graduate, you want to practice, we're going to pay off your loan. If that's the answer, okay. But I think there's something better than that."
One more rebuild
The position is funded for three years by the Tobacco Commission. The problems behind it are decades old. The communities Winslow needs to reach are spread across Virginia, and most of them have never set foot on a college campus.
He has more roots in Blacksburg than anywhere else — 30 years in and around this town. On his first morning in the new job, he walked into the building and ran into an old client on the maintenance crew.
He has been here before. Not this job. But this feeling. Standing at the start of something with no guarantee it works, no manual to follow, and no choice but to figure it out.
"What are we going to do," he said, "to make sure we bring in enough students with grit? Find the ones that want to be a James Herriot.
