Finding the Gain: A co-operative approach to rising veterinary costs

Cover image courtesy of Goulburn Valley Equine Hospital

Breeders are facing more financial pressures than ever before and are dramatically slashing their herd sizes, or leaving the game in increasing numbers. The declining foal crop and numbers of yearlings heading to the sales ring points to shrinkage across the board.

One of these pressures comes from the veterinary side of the business; in a world where every yearling is heavily scrutinised by radiography and endoscopy at the sales, and where corporations are scooping up vet clinics left and right, leaving some feeling backed into a corner.

The impact of corporate ownership is a focus on profit for the owners of the clinic, typically leading to a rise in costs for consumers, in this case breeders.

But what if there was another way?

The practice of conglomeration

In July 2025, the Altano Group, based in Germany, announced a “strategic partnership” with Scone Equine Group, which encompasses all five practices under the group’s banner, including the Scone Equine Hospital in the heart of New South Wales’ breeding base. With Hunter Equine Centre’s acquisition by Apiam Animal Health in late 2022, the move engulfs another equine veterinary practice in the world of corporate interests.

Altano - named for G1 Longchamp Prix du Cadran winner Altano (Ger) (Galileo {Ire}), who overcame soft palate displacement and a fetlock chip to win 13 of his 33 starts - own 96 veterinary practices across 10 countries, with the addition of the Scone Equine Group swelling their Australian numbers to 10. They also own WestVETS in Western Australia.

Apiam operates Australia-wide with 82 locations, eight of which are dedicated equine practices; in late 2021, they acquired Agnes Banks Equine Clinic and briefly had nine equine-specific clinics, before divesting itself of the clinic earlier in 2025 after significant restructuring did not lift the clinic’s performance.

The concern arises that, in a world where breeding costs have been spiralling across the board, a clinic belonging to corporate interests starts to think more and more about profit above all else.

“There is a global trend with lots of corporate structures coming in across Europe and Australia, such as IVC Evidensia, Equine Care Group, Altano, and others for whom ultimately the game is a financial one,” said Dr Denis Verwilghen, a specialist equine surgeon at Goulburn Valley Equine Hospital.

“The danger, which we have seen in Europe, is that these companies have been known to close practices indiscriminately if they don’t meet financial targets. The Evidensia Group recently closed 27 of their 100 small animal practices in the Netherlands, and it can happen overnight as a purely financial decision.”

When Apiam closed Agnes Banks - which was subsequently purchased by a team of veterinarians - they also divested from another, smaller clinic in Hastings in Victoria, as well as axing a United States joint venture, which had intended to distribute livestock products overseas. It’s not difficult to imagine what could happen if a more remote clinic was shuttered overnight, leaving owners with few alternatives.

With 46% of the Australian foal crop born in New South Wales in 2024, the shifting landscape of veterinary ownership leaves some feeling uneasy as the breeding season rolls on. In our article on costs we talked about the cost of getting one horse to the yearling sales from conception, with costs such as $900 for a set of x-rays and $600 for scoping becoming a necessity in the current market. For horses who need corrective surgery to make them viable sales horses, the cost is even higher. How much will this increase now the major veterinary clinics in Scone are both corporate owned?

Walking a fine line

With the desire for a greater profit margin, breeders are right to be concerned about changes to pricing. Verwilghen highlighted that, once a practice belongs to a larger entity, this becomes beyond the vets’ control.

“The other issue we’ve seen is that veterinarians may lose clinical autonomy in a corporate structure,” he said. “They may lose the ability to decide on treatments or prescriptions, and are surely not deciding on pricing, and they can’t give discounts.”

Or rather, they can’t give as many discounts as they used to. For the smaller breeder on a tight budget, this is another incentive not to breed, but Verwilghen also pointed out that sometimes independent vets don’t take all of their overheads into consideration.

“In the good old days, people would work for themselves, and it wasn’t unheard of to work 100 hours a week,” he said. “Just crack on, don’t be a pussy!’ Small clinics would have few people working as many hours as they could to get things done, but with corporate ownership, there is a need to meet Work Health and Safety regulations, because a corporate business can’t tolerate risking the law in those areas.

“This is good for employees, who can work normal hours and reduces some of the burden the veterinary industry is facing. Downside, it leads to increased costs for the practice because it takes nine people to do the same work that three were doing before.”

The Australian Veterinary Association’s Mental Health Approach asserts that veterinarians are on average 4 times more likely to die of suicide than the general population, and a recurring theme in reporting on the topic over recent years is that 70% of veterinarians have lost a peer or colleague to suicide, most often linked to workplace stress.

The industry is seeing a high turnover in professionals who leave the industry altogether - citing long hours and poor wages not commensurate with the level of work and stress required - which places a greater burden on the remaining staff.

Being beholden to a safety code will result in price surges to clients. It’s a difficult balance to achieve between affording to staff a practice appropriately and driving clients away simply by trying to cover those costs.

“It’s good for the staff, but when the customer has experienced a certain level of care for a certain cost, adhering to the rules and regulations will push up the cost,” Verwilghen said. “Many veterinarians didn’t account for their own time in the costs of running their small practices, and the reality of this is that, historically, owners have been majorly undercharged.”

Succession planning and client relationships

Client relationships are one of the first things to suffer under a corporate structure, Velwighen agreed. “The industry is very person-focused,” he said. “People don’t go to a vet hospital, they go to their vet.”

And, as a consequence, he highlighted that the industry has been “notoriously bad” at planning for a successor to a business.

“It’s a very difficult thing because owners want the same veterinarian, and it’s difficult for a practice to deal with changes of staff and internal succession planning. What happens is that the older vets have no one to hand the practice to, so when the corporations come knocking with a purchase price, it’s an easy way out. Without the presence of corporations, a lot of practices would have simply died out.”

In combination with vets not properly factoring in their own labour to costs, it becomes clear why it’s so difficult to even build the next generation of vets. If you’re not paying yourself for your own time, how can you afford to slow down and teach?

Purchasing a practice, or starting one from scratch, is also not a cheap affair. Basic equipment can run into the hundreds of thousands, as does insurance and licensing, and equine patients require very different facilities to small animals. To offer any kind of surgery or specialist care, both of which are more likely to bring profit and stability into the practice, requires additional staff and equipment.

“It’s not possible to start up from the back of your car any more like many did decades ago,” said Velwighen. “People don’t have the financial capacity to set up a practice, or to buy into a larger, existing one.

“Clients expect the highest standard, so we have equipment on the shelf waiting for that once-a-year injury or disease a horse may have. We had a horse here recently for an open joint surgery, and I looked around the room to see half a million dollars worth of equipment and five people helping out. It’s not the James Herriot days anymore where you stitch up a wound and tie up a cotton bandage with bailing twine and hope for the best.”

Velwighen suggests that this is where corporate ownership is helpful. A practice can stay afloat even when slightly underperforming or investing in new equipment, as other points in the business plan draw in a larger profit to offset it.

“The biggest positive thing about (large scale) ownership is that they can invest in infrastructure and staff, which leads to consistent service delivery and continuity of care,” he said. “The corporations have a larger pool of vets, and can move people between their European businesses and Australian ones to fill staff shortages, while also dealing with the headache of visa issues and veterinary board registration issues.”

If joining together can improve a practice’s stability, perhaps we can craft a solution that delivers results for the breeders as well?

Driving down costs by working together

One of the solutions to corporate ownership is different cost models; Goulburn Valley was purchased by the University of Melbourne in 2017 and has operated in partnership ever since, acting as the nursery for hundreds of young veterinarians while providing cheaper care to patients.

The University of Sydney, Charles Sturt University, and the University of Gatton all operate large-scale veterinary hospitals with specialised equine departments that also run clinical research trials which clients can benefit from participating in. The University of Gatton was the base for much of the pioneering research into vocal fold augmentation as a treatment for complications from laryngoplasty (tie-back surgery), and Charles Sturt University participated in an international trial for equine sarcoid treatment in 2022.

“We are like a corporate structure, yet owned by Melbourne University, our ownership is interested in other outcomes than most of the other corporate practices,” said Verwilghen.

“Our ownership is after educational return, not a financial outcome.”

The gift of well-trained vets is the reward for Goulburn Valley. Being an educational institution means that there is always time to train the next generation, without worrying about the overhead generated by two people doing the job of one. A limiting factor is that most university clinics are directly attached to the university themselves - which would make it hard to establish an educational clinic in more remote areas, but not entirely impossible.

A cost-sharing or co-operative ownership model is another option that could work for equine veterinarians, particularly in an area with a lot of breeding activity. CEPA Farm Supplies in Victoria is a co-operative business that supplies feed and farm equipment to 70% of Victorian thoroughbred farms, and board member Ryan Arnel thinks the co-operative model would work well for veterinary practices as a way of countering profit-based corporate ownership.

“CEPA is a farm supplies co-operative based in Bendigo,” Arnel said. “The ethos of a co-operative is to not be making huge profits but rather give those savings and profits back to its members, and it does that through scale.

“The rural industry within Australia was basically developed on co-operatives like CEPA, which was founded in 1963 and was created to benefit the members who were producers in the chicken industry, which was quite a big agricultural group throughout central Victoria. Those farms set it up and it’s grown from there. CEPA saw a space in the equine market that needed servicing and it's been able to do that.”

Arnel, who also owns Stonehouse Thoroughbreds, has experienced rising costs firsthand when utilising the Apiam-owned clinic in Bendigo.

“It was one of the first veterinary clinics (to be bought) in Australia in regards to these big corporations coming in,” he said. “We’ve seen that you lose that one-on-one relationship that you had with your vet, because now you're dealing with a head office somewhere who says, ‘this is the price and this is the service and tough luck’.

“Not that long ago, your veterinary-to-farm relationship was very personal, and if you had a co-operative structure, you’d be able to hold that relationship together and it would benefit both sides.”

Most large-scale farms, especially in Australia’s eastern states, already have their own veterinarians and small practices on site; it does not seem a stretch of the imagination to imagine several farms in an area combining to financially back a clinic that services, and is owned by, all of them. If the profit motivator is being able to reinvest in facilities and services at a co-operative practice, it would make sense for the industry to come together while preserving personal relationships with vets.

It’s not an impossible task - CEPA Farm Supplies is proof that a large-scale co-operative is possible, and large farms with their own laboratory facilities have the springboard to launch proper clinics - but it needs studs to join forces and use their collective financial power for the benefit of all of them.