ARPAS Newsletter

ARPAS Spring 2023 Newsletter

Executive Vice President’s Report

Al Kertz, PhD, PAS, Dipl. ACAS

ARPAS Executive Vice President
ANDHIL, Inc

ARPAS: Promoting professional competency and a culture of integrity

ARPAS is a Registry of accredited professional animal scientists. Such membership is the reason ARPAS exists—and needs to grow.

First, a bit about our demographics:

  1. 45% dairy, 23% beef, 9% horse, 5% dairy+beef, 5% swine, 4% feed, 3% poultry, 2% sheep, 1.5% companion, and then laboratory, goat, and aquaculture. There are major growth opportunities across all these categories.
  2. 26% female, but increasing quickly.
  3. Only 6% of members are graduate students. This is our biggest opportunity and challenge to grow membership.
  4. Members are 45% in companies, 29% academic, 19% consultants, and the balance in small business, government, and other categories. Again, there are growth opportunities across all of these categories. And an increase in academic members directly affects graduate student membership.

Graduate Students. Forty-five universities, including five in Canada, have been contacted and a faculty member has agreed to present to departmental graduate students why to become an ARPAS member. This has not gotten much traction yet in securing more graduate student members. But the first step is to create awareness of ARPAS, while the next major step is that graduate students actually take the exam. To much better facilitate this, we are searching for a vendor who could offer exams securely electronically 24/7 anywhere with adequate internet access. We also are working with current and soon-to-be appointed graduate student representatives of the American Dairy Science Association (ADSA), American Society of Animal Science (ASAS), American Meat Science Association (AMSA), and Poultry Science Association (PSA) to their graduate student organizations to enlist more students to take the ARPAS qualifying exam.

This past year several universities of note accounted for about one-third of total exams taken by graduate students:

  • 5 taken in dairy at the University of New Hampshire proctored by Peter Erickson
  • 5 taken in beef at Oklahoma State University proctored by Paul Beck
  • 3 taken in dairy at the University of Idaho
  • 5 taken (beef/dairy/horse) at Tarleton State University
  • 3 taken in beef at the University of Nevada at Reno

The link for the current exam process is www.arpas.org/Becoming-a-Member/ARPAS-Online-Exams

Highly Qualified Individuals (HQI). An alternate route for ARPAS membership to taking a qualifying exam was made available last fall for HQI. We had some initial untimely delays in processing some nominees and I apologize for that, but we have worked further to streamline the process. A key question is: What is your group, organization, company, university department’s number of ARPAS members? If every ARPAS member would nominate just one HQI, the impact on ARPAS membership would be astonishing! Please nominate a person(s) who you feel is qualified for ARPAS membership. Membership Information (arpas.org)

Why become an ARPAS Member?

  • If you are a faculty member, it is what you do for the animal science world—not necessarily “What’s in it for me?” How many of your fellow faculty are not ARPAS members?
  • If you have your graduate students become members while they are graduate students, they will likely continue with CEUs and membership for their career. If you are not a member, it is more difficult to have your graduate students become members.
  • It is about creating a more “critical mass” in the industry for professional standing and for a culture of integrity by committing to a code of ethics.   

Sponsorship. We are thankful that all sponsors from last year renewed this year, and were joined by new sponsor Hoards Dairyman. The full listing of current sponsors is below with links to their websites. Are you or your group on the list? There is still time to become a 2023 sponsor and be recognized for the balance of this year. www.arpas.org/Sponsors/Annual-Registry-Sponsorship

What thoughts do you have for what ARPAS can do, should do, or do better?

Contact me at andhil@swbell.net or 314-495-8939.

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