By Dot Sparer
dsparer@vet.uga.edu
When people ask John Glisson’s son, “What does your Dad do for a living?” the boy tells them, “He makes the world safe for chickens.” It’s true. Glisson and his colleagues at the Poultry Diagnostic and Research Center do just that.
“I started on the UGA faculty in September 1984, and I’ve been here ever since,” says Glisson. “It’s the best decision I ever made.”
But the title that best defines his work is clinical services chief in the PDRC, a research center which renders invaluable services to the poultry industry in Georgia and the other 49 states.
About 20 percent of Glisson’s time is devoted to teaching two to four students who are earning a master’s degree in avian medicine, the degree program which trains the majority of the poultry veterinarians in and out of the United States.
“By the time they get to me they’ve had a lot of basic courses,” says Glisson. “In my class they get a chance to use everything they’ve learned on real-life cases and diagnose what the problem is, how it could have been prevented, how to treat it, what to do next time. We’re out in the field almost every day all over north Georgia.”
Students come from North America, Latin America, Asia and Australia. “In the class of 2000, we had one student from Ecuador, one from Trinidad and one from Alabama. We called him our foreigner,” says Glisson.
“We’re looking for unusual students—veterinarians with some poultry background who want to spend the rest of their lives in that field. We look for a lot of personal skills,” he says, “because they’re going to be working in corporate America and will quickly find out that chickens are the easy part—people are the challenge. We’re very selective about who we take and we spend a tremendous amount of time with them. It’s very intensive hands-on training.”
There’s no program in the world like UGA’s master’s of avian medicine program, Glisson claims. “It was developed here about 30 years ago and is considered the top program of its type anywhere in the world.”
The PDRC has molded service and teaching together so tightly that “you can’t see where one starts and the other ends,” Glisson says. “All the service work I do, I have students with me all the time. While we’re having this conversation, I’ve sent two students to one of the local farms.”
Glisson, two colleagues and two students consult with poultry companies within driving range of Athens. “We’re looking at disease problems, trying to fix them, trying to prevent them next time.”
Their focus is disease prevention. “Human medicine is highly focused on sick people,” Glisson says. “We’re highly focused on not letting anyone get sick. We practice what we call population medicine. When you drive up into Madison County and see a broiler house on the side of the road, there are 25,000–30,000 broilers inside that house. It’s the equivalent of putting the whole population of Clarke County in Sanford Stadium. The medical profession does not deal with that situation, but that’s what we deal with every day.”
Glisson makes sure his students learn the economic outcomes of their decisions, because agribusiness is all economics today. Chicken houses are computer-operated, so the birds and their environment are a big investment. By the time a chicken gets to the processing plant, “you’ve got somewhere in the range of 45–50 cents a pound or $2 in that bird” he says.
The numbers they deal with are hard for most people to imagine. Georgia—the largest broiler producer in the nation—produces 30 million chickens a week, while the United States produces 8 billion chickens a year. “We can’t allow them to get sick,” says Glisson, “because the losses can be staggering.”
“If you’d asked me when I was 12 years old, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ I’d have said, ‘chicken farming.’ Working in poultry is all I’ve ever wanted to do. My family has farmed for generations. I wanted to put together my interest in science and agriculture and chickens, but it took me some time to figure out how I was going to do it. I decided I was going to do it through veterinary medicine. I’m one of the few people you’ll meet that is doing exactly what I want to do.” |
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