What are the responsibilities and job description for the Health & Animal Care Associate (Carlyle, IL) position at The Maschhoffs?
The Maschhoffs is currently recruiting for a full-time Health and Animal Care Associate in Southern Illinois.
Perform proactive, acute, and endemic disease health visits with a focus on clinical data collection, diagnostic sample collection and submission, and accurate reporting to the Herd Veterinarian to support intervention strategy decision making.
- Support and execute regional audit plans for biosecurity, animal care and handling, food safety/regulatory compliance, truck wash and transport audits, and costs management.
- Support execution and record-keeping of health management processes, protocols, and diagnostics.
- Support implementation of remote video auditing processes.
- Analyze audit results to determine compliance deficiencies, potential root cause and propose intervention countermeasures to improve performance through follow-up coaching and training
- Develop and conduct training on educational projects aimed at improving health and animal care acumen of animal caregivers and operations stakeholders.
- Ensure compliance with industry animal care and food safety programs (PQA, TQA) using a variety of training methods including large group, individual, webinar, and online training.
- Provide support for maintaining Breed-to-wean, wean-to-market, transport, and truck wash standard operating procedures.
- Lead animal care investigations ensuring thorough documentation of incident details, identification of contributing factors or root cause, and documentation of corrective action.
- Provide coaching and recommendations to production leadership to ensure animal care incidents receive corrective and disciplinary action that is appropriate and consistent with animal care policies.
- Train stakeholders on animal care incident management processes and develop routine communication methods to transfer learnings from reported incidents.
Minimum Qualification
Education:
Associates Degree, Bachelor Degree preferred.
Major(s): Animal Science, Agriculture Business, Veterinary Technician or a related field.
Minimum Years of Experience:
1 year of experience
Knowledge of:
- Necropsy skills including gross lesion identification and diagnostic sample submission and collection
- General biosecurity and disease prevention techniques and technologies
- Animal science and production practices applied in modern swine production systems
- Animal well-being principles including PQA and TQA programs
- Customer expectations concerning animal well-being and food safety
- Quality management systems, process verification
- Communication – Ability to communicate findings clearly verbally and in writing to Herd Veterinarian
- Computer software skills including internet and MS Office suite
- Working independently and in a team environment. Must be a self-starter
- Observation techniques, “root cause” analysis, and tactical problem solving
- Establishing effective partnerships with stakeholders
- Handling conflict situations effectively, with a minimum of noise.
- Plan effectively and meet personal due dates – Results Oriented
- Maintain daily discipline and punctuality
- Maintain high professional standards – Adherence to a high quality of work
- Provide timely and reliable support to disease challenges
- Handle physical demands of moving, lifting and securing animals
- Occasional need to be on-call to respond to reported hotline incidents or acute health challenges.
- Occasional need to work some weekends or holidays.