Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I welcome you and the rest of the standing committee not only to P.E.I., but to this lovely area of P.E.I. This is my home stomping grounds. I live a couple of communities over.
I've been dean of the Atlantic Veterinary College, and I'm past dean now, but when I heard that your committee was meeting in Stanley Bridge, I thought I'd sleep in a bit, have breakfast at home, and come and see you here instead of going to Charlottetown. So welcome.
I also thought I'd take the opportunity to describe a bit about what we do and what we are at the Atlantic Veterinary College. I know some of you may realize this and may have been there before. Wayne Easter is a strong supporter of AVC and I remember Mark Eyking having been there. Others may have been in to AVC as well.
If educational institutions, through the provision of highly qualified graduates, through the provision of professional services, and through the provision of research, which can help agriculture, can be part of the solution, I thought maybe you'd like to hear a bit about the Atlantic Veterinary College. So that's what I've come prepared to describe.
The AVC is a faculty of the University of Prince Edward Island and has been a faculty of that university since 1986. It's funded in part by the federal government, and the four Atlantic provinces now support it. Our operating budget is around $35 million per year and we have about $25 million worth of rolling research funds that we maintain that provide research activities out of the Atlantic Veterinary College.
It's the only vet school east of Quebec. It's one of five in Canada. We're partners with vet schools in the U.S. in the sense that we're accredited fully by the North American accrediting bodies that reside in the United States and Canada. There are 28 veterinary colleges in the United States.
We're also fully accredited internationally so that our graduates can practise anywhere around the globe. That's kind of a neat thing to consider when we think about globalization of agriculture, animal agriculture, and animal health.
We have 240 veterinary students in the program. That's 60 students per year, with 41 of those coming from Atlantic Canada, and 19 per year from international locations, primarily the United States, where there are not enough veterinary seats to go around. So we are a strong supplier of veterinarians in the United States.
It's a four-year program of studies, and students need to come to us with about two to four years of pre-veterinary education to get into the program. So it takes about eight years of study, and that's consistent across the country. It's the same in Guelph as it is in AVC.
We also have about 50 graduate students in our program. Something that people don't usually realize is that we also train to the doctoral level, PhD, master of science, and master of veterinary science.
We have about 100 faculty and about 125 staff. We are the only full-service veterinary primary care and referral centre in Atlantic Canada.
Our students undertake a very practical program of studies. In their final year, as some of the other panel members perhaps can attest to, our students go out on farms to provide services with our clinical faculty. They go into companion animal practices. They go to Calgary to undertake studies in feedlot medicine. They go to Quebec to undertake studies in dairy cattle medicine. They go to Kenya to undertake studies in international development activities around animal health and animal agriculture.
So if animal agriculture is part of the balanced system of agriculture in Canada, then I'd like to think that with your consideration and the consideration of others, perhaps we can continue to help provide solutions for ongoing research and ongoing provision of support to youth in agriculture.
One thing we try to do at AVC in terms of that is introduce young people to agriculture early on. We have a vet camp program at AVC that is highly subscribed. For four weeks this summer we will be taking 50 students from around the world per week, for four weeks, to talk to them about all there is to do with veterinarian medicine. They get lectured by our faculty, our staff, and our students, who describe agriculture systems to them and other things involving veterinary medicine.
I'll tell you, the waiting list to get into that program is just as long as the waiting list to get into vet school. So we try to encourage understanding of veterinary medicine and agriculture to the youth, because I do agree that there is an increasing disconnect between the citizenry and farming as it is today.
Apart from education and educating veterinary students, we also undertake programs of research, and I do think there are some opportunities here for farming to differentiate itself, its products, through research. Some of the research we carry out at AVC is in the area of veterinary epidemiology, aquaculture and fish health, and human biomedical research and human health. And when we think about what agriculture can be and should be in terms of the development and production of healthy food and the intersection with public health, environmental health, human health, and animal health, I think you can see that there's plenty of opportunity for differentiation research and the development of sustainable products from good, safe farming systems.
Thank you very much for the opportunity. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.