Vets Turn Routine Farm Visits into Potentially Life-saving Conversations

A pioneering healthcare initiative – Vet Your Prostate – has harnessed the trusted relationship between farmers and their vets to tackle a significant yet often overlooked health challenge in the farming community: prostate cancer.

Vet Your Prostate is recruiting and training veterinarians to raise awareness of prostate cancer risk among farmers, while offering at-home prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing kits that could lead to an earlier diagnosis, when survival rates are highest.

Farmers face around a 20% higher risk of prostate cancer than the general population. Despite this elevated risk, they remain one of the hardest groups for traditional healthcare to reach. Living and working in an environment that rarely stops, farmers often place their own health at the bottom of the priority list. The 24/7 demands of the job, combined with isolation and unpredictable schedules, can make standard clinics feel out of touch with their realities. The result is a compounded challenge: a high-risk population navigating a healthcare system that isn’t built or optimised to serve them.

Vet Your Prostate addresses this gap by working with farm vets – often the only medical professional a farmer sees regularly – to start informed, supportive conversations about prostate health during routine farm visits.

“Prostate cancer is unusual in that, when it is diagnosed early at stages one or two, survival rates are extremely high, with almost all men surviving for at least five years. But when the disease is diagnosed late, survival rates fall dramatically to less than 50%. That is why early detection is so critical.” says David James, director of patient projects and influencing, Prostate Cancer Research.

The test kits are provided by health tech partner Thriva. They provide an innovative autodraw device and the technology and clinical oversight that makes on-farm PSA testing a reality.

“A farmer might avoid visiting a doctor for months, but they won’t miss a vet appointment. It’s one of the most trusted relationships on a farm. By fitting the solution into the existing vet-farmer routine, the programme delivers life-saving awareness and Thriva’s PSA autodraw kits exactly where they’re needed most, meeting people where they are, not where we wish they’d be.” says Vernon Bainton, Chief Medical Officer of Havas Lynx, the creative health agency, behind the initiative.

"At Thriva, we’ve traditionally engaged a tech-savvy audience. But with prostate cancer, we faced a clear challenge: the people who needed proactive prostate support the most were the hardest for us to reach." Hamish Grierson, co-founder and CEO, Thriva.

The initiative is supported by IVC Evidensia and the British Cattle Veterinary Association (BCVA), organisations that collectively represent thousands of veterinary professionals across the UK.

David Black, president of the British Cattle Veterinary Association (BCVA) which represents over 1600 farm vets, said, “We are delighted to support this initiative. Farm vets are privileged to work alongside their farm clients and often becomes trusted friends with the opportunity to chat about issues that may impact them. Anything that we can do to raise awareness of prostate cancer among our farming communities is very positive”

The long-term goal of Vet Your Prostate is to prove that a distribution model using the veterinarian network can help to close the gap for 70,000 farmers across the country, delivering awareness and early-stage risk detection where it has previously been inaccessible.

Farm vets, farmers and potential partners are encouraged to get involved.

To join or find out more, visit here.