An alumnus of Iowa State University’s pledged three and-a-half million dollars to a renovation and expansion at I-S-U’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Gene Lloyd graduated with a degree in veterinary medicine and practiced for fifteen years in Shenandoah and nearby Essex. Then he found a niche for a product nobody was providing to livestock farmers.
A friend who was teaching agriculture told him nobody was offering farmers pre-mix for their feed. The blend of vitamins, minerals and antibiotics was mixed into grain at a ratio of five or ten pounds per ton, so he decided to set a company to make pre-mixes for swine. Lloyd didn’t find business success right away, selling it through other livestock veterinarians.
Llyod says vets didn’t know just how to market the pre-mix, and were reluctant to get into the feed business. So he developed a different plan, to get into the animal-health business that marketed livestock medications. It took changes in the regulations, and a lot of work to market the paradigm change. Lloyd went back to school, got a PhD in 1970, and taught at the “vet-med” school till 1982.
The gift he and his wife Linda are giving the school will expand the space of the college by 25-percent, add an intensive-care unit, offices, surgery suites, and imaging facility. It’ll also improve bio-security, including a new infectious-disease isolation area. He saw the “old” college of veterinary medicine, Lloyd remembers, back in the 1940s and fifties, and then he taught at the “new” one in the 70s and eighties. “I would say this is by far the biggest step in technology that I have witnessed since I graduated in 1949,” Lloyd declares.
He spoke from his business in Shenandoah where he and his wife still work when they’re not at home in Florida. The gift from Gene and Linda Lloyd comprises more than a third of the private funding that’ll go into the 48-Million-dollar project. The expansion of the animal hospital for horses and other large animals is expected to be done in 2008.