Caring for Virginia Tech's beef cattle

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impact 1:20 Caring for Virginia Tech's beef cattle

By:

Clark Dehart

17 Feb 2025

The Beef Cattle Center serves as a teaching, research, and outreach hub for School of Animal Sciences and Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine classes. Chad Joines '93 manages the Beef Cattle Center along with hired staff and students, who care for the cattle 365 days a year—rain or shine, to provide valuable experiential learning and research to help the beef cattle industry.

Here at Virginia Tech Beef Center, we take care of the beef cattle 365 days a year for the School of Animal Science. The animals here are used for classroom use and hands on experience. There's a lot of research goes on here. Right now, we're employing five students to help do that. They help us feed, they help us take care of animals, they help us work animals, just general farm labor that we need. So normal morning, we come in, see if we had any calves born the night before. Then we just feed whatever cows and calves we have here in the barn. Well, I'd like to, like, have my own cattle herd one day, and you learn a lot. It's a different challenge almost every day you get to come in, so it's enjoyable. We're calving cows right now, so those cows are here in the barn. So they're checked daily. They have cameras on them so we can check them overnight. We're calving 100 commercial cows down at Kentland right now. So quick as we're done here in town, we go down there. We'll run the silage truck. It runs back and forth to Kentland every day, so it takes about four to five hours to feed and check everything every morning.

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