A Good Day's Work

by John Demont

  Jessica, from her calm expression, could be sitting in a nice ergonomic chair in an office somewhere, reading a report. With all her training she could be in a doctor’s office, her name on the door, sipping a cappuccino between patients. She could be taking a day off at home, wondering what to pull out of the freezer for her husband, Les, and their two kids for dinner. Looking at her standing atop the overturned milk crate, you would not know that the barn smells ripe and that a few inches from her head a white Holstein cow with black spots like a Rorschach test is emptying her bowels in spectacular fashion.

  Most of us live within a humdrum universe where a person’s face becomes a sour knot if their iPhone dies. But this is the world Jessica has chosen, the life, for as far as she can remember, she wanted above all others. “I always knew I was going to be either a farmer or a vet,” she says. In fact, she inhabits both worlds. And so, amid the noise, the smell and the flying fecal matter, patches of sunlight lather her forty-year-old face with fire, making Jessica look as serene as she does happy.

  A staggeringly cold Wednesday morning. So cold that when Jessica pulled her truck—institutional grey with the green-and-white New Brunswick Department of Agriculture logo—into the provincial government parking lot at 8:30 a.m., she feared that the medicine in the modular insert on the back of the rig might freeze. She slapped the truck into park. Then she just left the engine running, as it would remain throughout her entire shift today, while she used her swipe key to enter the side door into the low-slung, regulation-issue government building. (When the weather is below freezing and she’s got the truck at home, Jessica either keeps the truck in the shop with her farm equipment, as she did last night, or outside with the Bowie box insert plugged into a ceramic heater.)

  The space inside the clinic is nothing special: metal filing cabinets, wooden desks, a glass window that opens to a counter where clients pay their bills, pick up medications and ask for advice from whichever vet is still in the office. A few touches let you know this is a veterinary medical office: posters of horse and cow breeds; the storage room with the stacks of medicine and supplies; the sawed-off X-ray machine, which she takes out to farm visits, sitting in the corner. Naturally, there are the requisite jars of weird animal fetuses: the foal that was only discovered when a dead mare was opened up, the pig with two sets of buttocks, the really long worm found in some animal’s intestine.

  Bernice Landry and Aline Mazerolle, the administrators who keep the trains running on time, were already in when Jessica entered, travel mug full of tea in hand. So were the trio of other vets who work out of the Moncton clinic: a pair of grown-up New Brunswick farm kids named Carl Dingee and Lisa Freeze, and André Saindon, whose words still carry the whiff of his Quebec birthplace and who is just months off from retirement. As she has done most days for the past eight years, Jessica removes her coat and hangs it behind the door in her office. Then she walks over to have a peek at the appointment book to see what’s come in since she left the previous afternoon.

  Jessica works for the Provincial Veterinary Field Services division of New Brunswick’s Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries. That means that she doesn’t see shih tzus and parakeets. She has never dewormed a pot-bellied pig, or had to put down a gerbil. Her world, like the world of her veterinary colleagues, is livestock—cows, horses, goats and sheep—that live, breed and die on the farms of southeastern New Brunswick. That makes them figures of historical import in this country. I say this because although Grand Banks cod and the inland fur trade may have brought the first European settlers to Canada, farming is what built it.

  Farmers in these areas don’t have to call Jessica or the others. But their services are cheaper than private clinics—for instance, they don’t charge mileage on visits—and they will go anywhere to deal with a problem. They also offer 24-7 emergency service, something few private practices list on their website because it’s hard work and not a moneymaker. Let me put it this way: rural private practice vets who make house calls are about as common as old-style country docs who show up in the midst of the snowstorm of the century. Which means that most farmers in the bottom left corner of New Brunswick can really only count on the four men and women inside this Moncton clinic, who, because their geographical districts tend to overlap, huddle for a few minutes each morning to ensure that all the calls get taken care of in the most efficient way possible.

  Jessica, who wears her hair—brunette, with blond highlights—pulled back in a red elastic, is tall enough to have played college basketball. Her face, devoid of makeup, is open and friendly. She doesn’t feel the need to fill the air. She listens. When Jessica talks—despite her eight years of university in a discipline that’s more difficult to get into than med school—it is not down to the listener. “It is hard to feel too superior when your arm is stuck inside a cow’s rear,” she likes to say. Also true is that you just don’t grow up that way if your dad is a farm boy from New Brunswick and your mom a nurse from Manitoba.

  Her parents met on neutral ground, Vancouver, when George Harvey’s plan to work his way west had reached its natural conclusion. Somehow he persuaded the former Kristine Anderson to head back to the Petitcodiac River area of New Brunswick, where two hundred acres of good farmland could be had for the price of a cardboard box in an alley on the east side of Vancouver.

  Their nine kids grew up feeding and milking the cows, slopping out the barn, bringing in the hay. Jessica, the eldest, was no hick: a good student, she played sports and had a social life. From the get-go she was also involved in 4-H, a mainstay of kid life in rural farming communities across this country. At the beginning of every year she got a calf from her dad’s farm and was told she was responsible for feeding, washing and clipping.

  “My favourite was a heifer named Jade. She was a really nice-looking cow,” recalls Jessica, ready to hit the farm in her green sweater, tan vest and blue jeans. “We used to have a half-ton truck and a cattle box and we used to put the calves in the cattle box. We’d go compete locally at fairs around Sussex and Moncton. The top two would go to Provincials. And if they did well, they would get to go to the Royal.”

  If this sounds like a dreamy childhood, it was. Young people are deserting the Canadian countryside. When you grow up on a farm in New Brunswick—just like when you grow up in a Newfoundland outport or around the family store in rural Saskatchewan—most kids, in these early days of the twenty-first century, vamoose at the first opportunity. Yet, with one exception, all nine of the Harvey kids live in New Brunswick. They’ve also either followed their mom into health care in some way or are involved in farming like their dad, who at sixty-eight shows no signs of ever wanting to retire. Jessica essentially split the difference. She’s a vet who works almost exclusively on farms.

  JESSICA, by her own admission, has “a heavy foot.” So at a bracing speed we head through the flat New Brunswick farmland, past the silos and frozen ground, moving west from Moncton through the farm belt, where, except for university in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and a few years of veterinary work in Alberta, she has spent her life. Each of the Moncton vets has their unofficial areas: Carl does Kent County, which is north of Moncton; Lisa handles the area around the university town of Sackville. André’s small universe is the area between Moncton and the village of Salisbury, which is where Jessica’s territory begins.

  Her territory lacks wide-open space. Instead, it is mostly rolling hills, woods—pine, cedar and fir—and brooks filled with trout. Her domain includes the farming centres of Salisbury, Havelock and Petitcodiac, where she grew up, just down the road from Manhurst, where she now lives. She visits the scattered dairy, cattle and sheep operations and the horse stables. If a farmer calls and says he’s got a sick cow or a mare that has foaled and things have gone sideways, Jessica goes, regardless of the weather or, when she’s on call, the hour. “I measure everything in time,” says the woman who nonetheless tells me that she puts fifty to sixty thousand kilometres a year on her tr
uck. Using her preferred frame of reference, she might need an hour to get from one appointment to the next. Sometimes, then, she goes a little fast. “I’ve had a few fender-benders,” says Jessica, sun bouncing off her Ray-Bans, as she moves the wheel with the experienced driver’s economy of motion. “But so far I’ve been lucky.”

  Right now we’re headed for the village of Salisbury, about twenty-five clicks from Moncton, and a farm owned by people named Dykstra, one of the many Dutch farming clans in southern New Brunswick. The radio is on. Jessica likes a pop station with the call letters K94.5; a talk jock named Todd Vigneault is a guilty pleasure. But she’s an incessant-enough channel surfer that the button has been worn smooth and shiny. “I listen to everything,” she says. “I like to drive. If I’ve had a hard or a draining or a challenging call, sometimes the time between one appointment and the next gives me time to unwind.”

  This call, she tells me as she parks beside the red Dykstra barn, should be routine. As we get out, the eldest son emerges from the house, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  “Where are Mom and Dad?” she asks.

  “Inside,” Martin-Dan Dykstra replies, “where it’s warm.”

  Jessica gears up inside a comfortable room where milk is stored in big gleaming tanks. Her job, at its essence, is simple: to make farming operations profitable. Vets can increase a farmer’s bottom line in two ways: by reducing illness and mortality and by boosting productivity. Both require a “herd health” program: an overall approach to preventing outbreaks of diseases such as mastitis and pneumonia or, saints preserve us, hoof-and-mouth or mad cow. But also by ensuring that in the case of cows, they yield lots of milk. For that to happen the cows need to get pregnant. Which is really why, on a day when the temperature with wind chill hits minus forty, Jessica is here.

  She fiddles with the ultrasound machine and battery pack in her knapsack, then straightens out the loopy extension cord with the ominous-looking “rectal probe.” Finally, Jessica pulls the goggles over her red toque and the straps of the knapsack over her shoulders. “It’s Ghostbusters,” she says, laughing. Then we head into the bowels of the barn.

  Most veterinarians don’t want to go where she is headed. Most new veterinary college grads would rather neuter pets in a nice city office than have to perform a less-lucrative Caesarean section on a ton of mare out in the sticks somewhere. There are a whole host of reasons for this shift. For one thing, there are fewer farm kids growing up around livestock and developing that affinity for large animals. As much as anything, the ascent of the female vet is what is doing in big-animal medicine. The first woman—an American—didn’t graduate from a Canadian veterinary college until 1928. The first Canadian woman came eleven years later. But so much has changed since then: today women are the majority of the 250 to 300 graduate students from Canadian vet colleges. There’s a lot of speculation on why this is so: for one thing, women’s high school and undergraduate marks tend to be higher than men’s. It’s also just easier for women to get into veterinary schools than it once was.

  Their unwillingness to take on large-animal work is partially a girth-and-strength issue. The new breed of female veterinarian also wants to be able to go home at five o’clock rather than head off to a frozen barn somewhere where a distraught farmer and sick sheep await. All of which means that female large-animal vets are a dying breed. New Brunswick’s provincial vet service has only four: Jessica; her Moncton colleague, Lisa; a vet in Sussex named Nicole Wannamaker; and Olivia Harvey, who works near the town of Woodstock and happens to be Jessica’s sister. As far as I can figure out, there isn’t a single female private practice vet who exclusively handles large animals in the entire province.

  Vets can do different things: they can research; they can try to keep outbreaks of infectious salmon anemia from roaring through fish farms; they can set the broken wings of owls. Jessica for the longest time wasn’t sure if she wanted to be a farmer or a vet. But once she decided, it was big-animal work or nothing for her. “I did not want to do any small-animal practice,” she says. “It’s just not my thing. I find it too intense and emotional. I think I’m caring and compassionate, but small-animal medicine is too over-the-top for me.”

  For a time getting there didn’t look good. Her marks at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro, Nova Scotia, where she did an animal sciences degree, were decent (an 85 average). But the Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown only accepted thirteen New Brunswick students a year. When Jessica didn’t get in the first year, she moved back to her dad’s farm in Petitcodiac and worked there while she upped her grades. She kept applying. “The first couple of years I tried to get in, the college was more geared toward small animals,” she says. “The year I finally got in four people interviewed me. Three of them were large-animal vets.”

  THE Dykstra farm is a “free stall” operation. Unlike “tie stall” setups, where cows are kept in one stall and milked there, the Dykstra cows are free to wander around the cavernous barn between milkings. When they’re ready to milk, they sashay into the “parlour,” a series of raised platforms with gates that prevent the animal from moving. Martin-Dan or one of his family wash and clean the cow’s udders before the milking machine is attached. When the milking is over, the farmers clean up. The cow just walks out. Both types of farms have advantages and disadvantages for vets: tie stalls are usually smaller and a bit warmer. Free stalls, Jessica says, tend to be big steel structures, which means that on days like today they are a whole lot colder.

  When I wasn’t looking, she pulled a long sleeve over her left arm. It resembled one of those orange cellophane packages in which your paper arrives on a rainy day. Martin-Dan is scanning down his clipboard at the list of cows that he wants her to examine. Usually he marks them with paint before she arrives. “But today I’m apparently a little early, which never happens,” she says in a teasing way. Jessica starts to slowly work her orange-sleeved arm into the rectum of the first cow that requires her attention. The process is a visceral one: as she goes, she cleans out the waste with her left hand. Vets, it turns out, always use their non-dominant arm for the procedure, since once upon a time they jotted notes with their good hand throughout the examination. Over a radio somewhere in the barn John Mellencamp sings the praises of being born in a small town. “You feel for certain features in the ovaries,” Jessica explains. “Through the uterus you can tell what stage she is at in her heat cycle or how far along in the pregnancy so that the farmer can manage her lactation.” Ultrasound images of the inside of the cow appear on her goggles, helping her to complete the picture.

  This cow is “open,” which, in the parlance of the dairy farm, means not pregnant. The next one isn’t. The one after that is. The stoic Martin-Dan doesn’t change his expression either way, even though the longer a cow is open, the less money a farmer makes. Jessica passes the information on without editorializing as her fingers roam among the cow’s innards. She talks constantly, in her unhurried way, as she works. The woman is by nature friendly. It’s also part of the job. “At first it was hard to multi-task,” she says. “I’d be concentrating on the job—checking the cow or horse—and I wouldn’t be talking this much. But as I got more experienced, it got easier. You’re always doing something and talking to the farmer at the same time. The farmers want you to maximize your time while you’re here. The meter’s running, remember. Plus, they’re farmers. They don’t see a lot of people. So they love to talk.”

  Their lingo makes sense: cows that have just calved are “fresh”; those that have taken a rest from milking, as happens in the two months before they give birth, are “dry.” If everything is going well and the task doesn’t demand too much of her attention, Jessica troubleshoots, talking diet and nutrition and vaccinations with her farmers to head off troubles before they begin. It’s a two-way street; if Martin-Dan has concerns, he tells her. Jessica looks at a cow with a bad hoof, which they decide to keep an eye on. Then Martin-Dan leads her to a stall holding
a thin-looking cow and her calf.

  “She hasn’t been eating well,” he says of the cow, which has ribs that show. “She’s pretty lethargic.” They manoeuvre the animal to the side of the stall, where a gate keeps her still as Jessica does her physical. She listens to the heart, lungs and abdomen through a stethoscope. Then she plunges her hand into the cow’s rear end and gropes around to check some other organs. The news is bad, the diagnosis unequivocal: a heart murmur. The farmer asks if anything can be done. When Jessica says no, the cow’s fate is sealed: one way or the other the cow will be put down, probably to become hamburger.

  By the time Jessica is back in the milk house, stripping off her gear, she has probed by hand the guts of a dozen cows. Only six of them are pregnant. There’s a cloud over Martin-Dan’s face. On Jessica’s advice he’s been using an artificial insemination program called Ovsynch to get the herd reproducing and keep the cycle of milk production going. “He’s discouraged,” she tells me. “But those are normal results. Maybe the cows have been working hard at milking and not working at breeding. There could be fertility issues. It’s hard to know. Martin-Dan is just very enthusiastic; he wants to do a really good job. He wants them to get pregnant.” They work through his options. It takes a few minutes, but she talks him down; he’ll give the program another shot, he says. Jessica, who has taken off her messed-up coveralls, is using a heavy-duty spray to clean her gear. Through the steam, I see her smile when Martin-Dan announces his decision.