Inside the largest indoor tilapia facility in the USA: A vet student’s unique rotation experience

Blue Ridge Aquaculture in Martinsville, Virginia, is the largest indoor tilapia facility in the U.S., producing over 4 million pounds annually, all under one roof. It's one of the most advanced food animal facilities in the country, and the health of every fish here matters. In their final year, veterinary students at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine take on hands-on clinical rotations. Some choose small animal clinics. Others choose farms. Sebastian chose something different. There's one thing to teach students that. It's another thing to actually present them with a problem. And here we have a student who is going through hands-on by being in the facility on a regular basis to learn these things. Actually, the sheer size of the enclosures, the tanks, the size of the filters it's just on a scale of something I've never seen before. They need different care but regardless similar care than our traditional animal species that do go to the vet. They get an experience in a modern state-of-the-art aquaculture facility where they can put their veterinary education to use. Such things as physiology, pharmacokinetics, you talk biosecurity, infectious disease, welfare. So bringing an intern on is wonderful. I mean that gives us the opportunity to keep interacting with Tech, gives him all the experiences. He can't get anywhere else in the continent of the United States. He can't get this experience. There is a lot of understanding the management practices, understanding the husbandry, being able to analyze and assess water quality parameters and problem-solve based on those things. It helps the student kind of decide where they want to go. It doesn't make a final decision, but it gives them a broadened scope of the veterinary profession. This is another opportunity for me to do that, to work with an unfamiliar species where I can practice my problem-solving skills outside of the classroom and in a real-life setting.