CALF_News_October_November_2021

50 CALF News • October | November 2021 • www.calfnews.net R ecollections BY BETTY JO GIGOT PUBLISHER O nce upon a time, there wasn’t a multimillion-dollar industry called “the cattle feeding industry” nor was there any of the allied industry support to help provide one of the safest and tastiest products known to man – beef – efficiently and economically. One tends to forget the long trail from a few pens of cattle being fed to the millions on feed today. I got a firsthand look at the develop- ment of the industry and its amazing achievements in 1994 when I wrote a five-part series on feedyard veterinarian Van Brimhall. One of the first feed- yard veterinary consultants during the development of the feedlot industry in the Texas Panhandle, “Dr. Van” detailed the step-by-step development of cattle feeding and animal health industries. The story began: My first job out of veterinary school was at Coachella Valley Feedyard near Ther- mal, Calif. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. At the end of the year, I was up to $600 a month and doing what I wanted to do. Being a feedyard veterinarian in those day was kind of like being the head of a doctoring crew now. You didn’t have a lot of input, but by persistence you could have some. Really, we were probably allowed all the input into management decisions we could handle, because after eight years in college, you don’t know a lot. You’ve got a lot of book learning, but not much practical experience.” Brimhall went on to say that the only time he had been on a feedyard was once during vet school. He only knew of one resident fulltime veterinarian in the feedyard business, so he was delighted that he had gotten a job. I told my classmates and they said, ‘That doesn’t make sense. If you work for a feedyard for 30 years, you’re not going to have a practice in a building – a facility – to sell to retire on.’ But my answer was, ‘If I work for the right feedyard and watch intelligent people, and when they’re investing a lot, I invest a little bit, I will make enough to buy your damn clinic when you retire.’ And it worked out just exactly that way. Dumb as I am, you’ve got to run with people smarter than you are to learn anything. Brimhall was born in Jacksboro, Texas. His mother dreamed of him going to college and strongly encouraged him. In 1945, at the age of 16, he graduated from high school one weekend and went to work the next Monday morning, dig- ging ditches on a pick-and-shovel gang for $25 a week for six 10-hour days. He lived at home, worked for two weeks and was paid his $50. He bought a $1.98 cardboard suitcase and as he put it, went West. West was where several of his aunts went during “Grapes of Wrath” days. He saved, started junior college and then volunteered for the Air Force during the Korean War. He was sent to a meat and milk inspection school at Colorado State University, which sealed his fate. That’s where I met some of the great minds in veterinary medicine and they got me interested in veterinary medicine. When released from the service, Brimhall was married with two children, and after working on a ranch for a couple of years, he enrolled in the University of California. During his schooling, he saw the school move from animal husbandry to animal science, so he got to see the old VAN BRIMHALL, DVM pioneers of animal husbandry and the new shining stars, as he called them. In fact, as a student, I worked as a student flunky for Dr. Glenn Lofgren when he developed the net energy system; and for Dr. Paul Gregory, who was one of the early-day geneticists in the dwarfism thing. I had the good fortune of knowing any number of great people like that. Dr. Howard Cole was a graduate student in 1937 at Berkeley when he first discovered vitamin E was essential in reproduction. Even with working three jobs, graduation was looking iffy until Kern County Land & Cattle Company offered a $750 scholarship. The three requirements were need, grades and an inclination to go into the feeding indus- try. Brimhall got the scholarship. NEXT ISSUE: BRIMHALL FOL- LOWS THE INDUSTRY TO TEXAS. 