With hopes for vet school, CREAM embraces cows, early mornings

When he went to sleep at 1 a.m. Wednesday, UNH senior Matt Powers set three alarms to make sure he would wake up on time in the morning. But unlike the stereotypical college student, it wasn't so he could rouse out of bed for an 11 a.m. class after another late night.

"Morning" for Powers in that case meant only two hours later, when he woke in order to make it to his shift at UNH's Fairchild Dairy Teaching and Research Center on time. Over the course of the next few hours, he and a few classmates would be responsible for feeding, milking, and cleaning up after several dozen full-grown cows, calves, and heifers at the facility on the outskirts of campus.

He finished with more than an hour to spare before his 8 a.m. class.

"Some people go to bed early and are religious about it," said Powers, who studies animal science and is in the pre-vet program. "I'll make up for it in class or something later on."

Powers is one of 33 students in UNH's Cooperative Real Education in Agricultural Management program. CREAM, as it is more commonly called, is a two-semester, eight-credit class that introduces students to all aspects of running a registered Holstein dairy herd. Students, or CREAMers, work in four committees over the course of the semester, covering breeding, finances and scheduling, planning and education, and production management. The 13-year-old program is more popular than ever, thanks in large part to an influx of pre-vet students, who see the training as a way to set themselves apart when they apply to the country's ever-competitive veterinary schools.

"They have to still get good grades in chemistry and organic chemistry and all that, but if they've done that and this, they're usually in," said Drew Conroy, CREAM advisor and professor of applied animal science.

The CREAM program was once a mainstay of dairy management students, but the tide has almost completely shifted.

"How many of you are in the pre-vet program?" Conroy asked at the program's weekly business meeting Tuesday night.

Nearly every hand went up.

"I think the vet schools see this as a unique program compared to other undergraduate programs," said Kelly Greenbacker, a graduate student and the course's teaching assistant, after the meeting.

CREAM is one of only two programs in the country in which students actively manage a dairy herd. The other program, which CREAM is modeled on, is a smaller one at the University of Vermont.

Nationwide, approximately 5,750 applicants competed for 2,650 places in the 28 United States veterinary schools in 2007, according to resources on the Pennsylvania State University's website. That works out to a nationwide acceptance rate of 46 percent, a number that has been either equal to or more competitive than the acceptance rate for the nation's medical schools over the past few years.

Which is why CREAMers, who generally have little to no prior farm experience and often aspire to ultimately work with small animals, embrace a herd of Holsteins and the occasional insanely early morning-- to set themselves apart.

"This is active learning," said Conroy of the program.

In this case, "active learning" means students are responsible for covering four shifts a day, with three students on each shift. The "morning" shift starts at 3:45 a.m., and usually wraps up around 5 a.m. The "mid-morning" shift starts at the generous hour of 5:30 a.m. A second round of shifts starts at 2:45 p.m. The schedule allows students to get one round of shifts done before classes start, as well as the farm's full-time workers to finish the day at a reasonable hour.

"We usually do two shifts a week [per person] and we'll have nine weekend shifts [during the year]," said Powers.

By the time 4 a.m. rolled around Wednesday morning, Powers was underway proportioning out the nine different elements that make up the herd's feed. Inside, junior Kayla Aragona, also in the pre-vet program, began milking.

"It has sensors, so it knows when to stop," Aragona said of the pump that is used in the process.

This automation means that her role consisted primarily of an initial inspection of each animal's milk, an iodine application following the milking, and a little tough love throughout. Between calls of "Git!" "Let's go," and "C'mon, ladies," Aragona successfully navigated the program's cows through the milking process in just over 45 minutes. The cows moved into place with relatively little cajoling before pumping anywhere from 30 to 60 pounds of milk each.

"I love milking," Aragona said. "It's fun."

But yes, she added, the early mornings do take some getting used to.

"Sometimes it's hard," Aragona said. "There are times when I sleep through my alarm and get here right when we start milking at four."

By 5 a.m., the first shift was complete, and the focus shifted from CREAM's herd of cows to the farm's heifers and calves for the mid-morning shift.

Powers, who was working a double shift, was joined by fellow senior and pre-vet student Izzie Fletcher.

"It's kind of rough because I live off-campus," Fletcher said of the early mornings as she cleaned out the calves' stalls. "I usually go to sleep around 9:30 so I'm not horribly exhausted for my shift. When I get home, I usually get about three more hours of sleep, and that seems to work well."

Yet all involved expect an influx of applications as the class recruits for next year's program in the coming weeks.

"I don't think we're going to have much of a problem [filling the program]," said Emily Malnati, CREAM president.

Conroy said advisors in the pre-vet program are now highly recommending that the advisees consider taking the class.

"We used to struggle to get 15 people, and we really needed 15 people," he said. "But now we're actually turning people away."

Conroy and CREAMers alike stressed that, although the early mornings at the barn may be the most unique aspect of the program, there's a lot more to the program than simple chores at the farm.