World Pork Expo Insights with Novus, Feedworks, Feed Armor and Norbrook

In this dynamic episode recorded live at World Pork Expo 2025, Dr. Casey Bradley sits down with four influential voices shaping the future of swine health and nutrition—covering everything from nursery pig performance to antibiotic strategy and feed biosecurity.

🎙️ Jesus Acosta (Novus International) introduces Novus PV, a protected benzoic acid product proven in Europe and now validated under U.S. zinc oxide conditions. He shares exciting feed conversion and immune response data, as well as insights into how lower-dose protected acids could complement traditional organics.

🎙️ Tommy Shipp (Feedworks) explains how eLife, a polyphenol blend mimicking a Mediterranean profile, can offset oxidative stress and partially replace vitamin E—potentially boosting performance and reducing costs. He also dives into CoRouge, a monovalent copper oxide product that shows nursery-stage success with lower inclusion rates and environmental impact.

🎙️ Dr. Megan Bollin (Norbrook) breaks down the advantages of Cefenil, a bioequivalent to Excenel with superior syringability and a short 4-day meat withdrawal time. She discusses PRRS management, antibiotic use strategies, and the real-world challenges of secondary co-infections in swine respiratory disease.

🎙️ Fredrik Sandberg (Feed Armor) presents the research and innovation behind FeedArmor, a feed mitigant proven to match the efficacy of formaldehyde. With added benefits like improved feed intake, fewer prolapses, and lower handling risks, this tool is changing the way farms manage feed hygiene and performance.

From protected acids and polyphenols to injectables and feed safety, this episode is packed with insight for producers, nutritionists, and veterinarians alike—straight from the show floor.

💡 What You’ll Learn:

• How Novus PV works under U.S. zinc oxide models and E. coli challenges
• When and where eLife can offset vitamin E costs during heat stress
• Why Cefenil is a user-friendly injectable option for respiratory support
• How FeedArmor performs as a formaldehyde alternative—plus its unexpected benefits

📨 Email technical@animistic.co for questions or guest inquiries.
🔗 Learn more at animistic.co
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Transcript

0:00:00
(Casey Bradley)
Well, we're here at World Pork Expo with Jesus Acosta with Novus and we're here to talk about

0:00:19
(Casey Bradley)
your new product.

0:00:20
(Jesus Acosta)
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me here. Well, the first thing I wanted to say is it's new to the US, but we have had this product for a while in Europe. So yeah, so we knew since we launched the product, we knew we have good data on this product. Even a few years ago, I mean before they banned zinc oxide. And then with the zinc oxide ban, this product took off mostly in Spain and France and Italy. And we have had that product for more than 10 years over

0:01:03
(Jesus Acosta)
there. We always wanted to have the product here in the US, but one of the ingredients of the product was not authorized. And then we finally got released. So it's authorized now. And so we brought the product here. It was called Europe Provenia, or it is, because we still have it there. But then here we couldn't

0:01:27
(Jesus Acosta)
use Provenia, so we needed a new name. So we called it Novus PV, as protected benzoic. So this product is basically benzoic acid. Benzoic acid has been used in our industry throughout and we know it's a good product, it's a good organic acid. However, what we ended up doing with this good product is to protect it with a fat matrix that basically gets released in the intestine. Instead of acidifying the stomach, which is the mode of action of pre-organic acids. We release this acid in the intestines. This makes a kind of a different mode of action and we see that that differential in mode of action

0:02:17
(Jesus Acosta)
makes a very interesting probe because it can act differently than the traditional way to add organic acids. In Europe, we have a really good record there, but we needed to prove that that works in here in the US under the conditions of the US. So, and also because we use zinc oxide here. So, the first task that we needed to, the answer that we needed to have is it works, if it works here on the high zinc oxide, we run two studies so far, one commercial, one mode of action.

0:02:54
(Jesus Acosta)
In the commercial one, we got a feed conversion response. We got a wave response and we had in the mode of action an E. coli challenge, and actually BV was really good. It resembles towards a non-challenge group, and we analyzed inflammation cytokines, we analyzed diarrhea, and it reduced diarrhea, and the profile of cytokines, anti-inflammatory and inflammatory was resembling again the non-challenge group.

0:03:33
(Jesus Acosta)
So we are happy that we got the product to work also under US conditions. Obviously we need more data. I am a research scientist, I always need more. You need more data. we need more data. I'm a research scientist. I always need more.

0:03:46
(Casey Bradley)
You need more data. You're talking to the research person, right?

0:03:50
(Jesus Acosta)
Right, right. So you need more. So we are now working on application. So, you know, is it better to do it the first 21 days throughout the nursery with this other organic acid, it works well, or, you know, combinations of things things so that's the next questions are more on that.

0:04:09
(Casey Bradley)
Well I don't know if you remember but I did some acid blends with Vivo Vital when I was at DSM and invasion and looking at that Xerox ink model and we presented the first year Xeroxz summit over in Copenhagen. But obviously when we're looking at an unprotected benzoic acid, we're looking at that 0.5% level. Are you able to get lower and I guess then more cost effective with the coded and unprotected?

0:04:39
(Jesus Acosta)
Yes, a really good question. So I know, I know, you know, with free Benzoic, you are in around 10 pounds or five kilos per ton. With our protected Benzoic, we lower that inclusion because it is protected. We lowered that inclusion to five pounds or 2.5 kilograms per ton. So that that us lower inclusion, less space. Again, I think, the thing with the organic acids

0:05:14
(Jesus Acosta)
and it's a really good question to have is, I think they are complementary because one is protected, one is free and they have complementary modes of action. So you can add both at the same time as well. About cost, I think, you know, we are competitive in cost. I am the

0:05:32
(Jesus Acosta)
research guy, so I didn't need to ask.

0:05:34
(Casey Bradley)
You guys are selling it, right?

0:05:36
(Jesus Acosta)
Yeah, guys that sell it, but we are pretty competitive because of that production.

0:05:44
(Casey Bradley)
So obviously it's really focused on nursery pigs, but this product

0:05:48
(Casey Bradley)
to me would also have some value possibly in black pigging cells. Have you guys looked at all

0:05:54
(Jesus Acosta)
of that in Europe? Some of that yes, but like you said, the major focus has been the nursery pig. We know that because of the mode of action of this product we can certainly have effects in the sow and in the growing finishing animal. We are actively actually working on those areas as well, but like I, the focus has been the nursery animal and that's why we are, we have the bulk of data and the more reliable information right now. But for sure that's something that we are considering and we are building. Well I'm really excited because I mean

0:06:38
(Casey Bradley)
if we think of it as protected, we get it to the hindgut, we're going to have the opportunity to lower ammonia and nitrogen extrusion by working in the hindgut, we're going to have the opportunity to lower ammonia and nitrogen extrusion by working in the hindgut, even in a larger animal potential.

0:06:49
(Jesus Acosta)
It might actually in the last E. coli challenge, and this is a little bit different, but it speaks to a similar effect. We modulate the microbiome to more butyrate producing bacteria. So that's shifting. It's true. And since it doesn't get released like a capsule, like you get released in one section of the intestine, everything, no, it gets released constantly because it's a matrix.

0:07:16
(Jesus Acosta)
So it gets released constantly in the lower gut, in the first, sorry, in the upper gut and then the lower gut. in the first, sorry, in the upper gut and then the lower gut. So we have effects throughout. Yes, that becomes important right now. I think in Europe is one of the things we are looking at. Yes, for sure.

0:07:35
(Casey Bradley)
Now, have you just looked at E. coli or have you also looked at the salmonella

0:07:40
(Jesus Acosta)
aspects control? Yes, we have. We have one trial that shows that reduction is not a challenge, but we have another study trial that shows reduction in E. coli and increase in lactobacilli and we look at the ratio between the two and actually the shift is in favor of the lack of acetyl-A. In the last E. coli challenge, we observed that the butyric acid was negatively correlated. So the more butyric acid-producing bacteria,

0:08:16
(Jesus Acosta)
there was correlated negatively with the E. coli counts. So it was not directly to the E. coli, but it was more in favor of the butyric acid-producing bacteria.

0:08:28
(Casey Bradley)
Well, great. Well, thank you for talking a little bit more about PV for the U.S. market. And what was the name in the European market? Grovinia.

0:08:35
(Casey Bradley)
Grovinia.

0:08:36
(Jesus Acosta)
That's the name. So, very excited. It's a product that I like. It's a product that is very consistent, which is a feature that is hard to have in this space. I really like to work with this product, but there are still a lot of questions to answer. In my view, we need to get deeper. So I'm here to keep working on it and understand why, you know, the differences across trials and all that.

0:09:06
(Casey Bradley)
I already see some advantages of synergistics to your other asset products that you have on the market.

0:09:11
(Jesus Acosta)
Yes, that's exactly what we are looking at. It's not easy to find, you know, these interactions and synergistic effects are rare, but it is for sure something that we need to understand and pursue because if you have a synergistic effect, that's kind of the best solution, exactly, and the best for the producer. So yeah, we are here to understand how the products work and I am certainly interested in that in my position.

0:09:46
(Casey Bradley)
Well thank you so much. Thank you. Well we are live at World Pork Expo with Dr. Tommy Shipp with Feedworks. Welcome Tommy. Thank you. Good to see you again. Good to see you too. We were just catching up on how many years ago it was that we met and I was telling Mike before the event that you were very inspiring to me early in my career, treated me with kindness, and I really appreciate that.

0:10:15
(Casey Bradley)
And watching you through your career and my career now,

0:10:19
(Casey Bradley)
it's been 15 years.

0:10:21
(Tommy S.)
Yeah, it's been a long time. But yeah, like I said, that was one thing that, and I still like to do it, is like with young nutritionists, and I guess it's because of the way I was treated when I first come into the industry. A gentleman that was, he wasn't an employee, he was a consultant at Dukoa when I first started there, was a gentleman by the name of Dr. Fred Madsen.

0:10:45
(Tommy S.)
And Fred, you know Fred, but probably one of the most intelligent people I've ever run across, but he was very approachable. You could talk to him about anything and he wanted to help. And I just kind of learned some, I guess, some good habits from him that way. So, you know, and I even did that at Smithfield as young, young nutritionists come in, you know, I always told them I was, I would dig the ditches.

0:11:11
(Tommy S.)
You just stay between the ditches until you get enough comfort that now you can play outside the ditches. So it, it was always, that was always just a way that I always like to be with people.

0:11:25
(Tommy S.)
It was one of those, because you never know, your careers are just a small industry and you just never know where people are going to end up ten or fifteen years down the road.

0:11:39
(Casey Bradley)
I know, and because of you and others, I do the same thing. Part of the process of interviewing and high-end videos is to get our knowledge, get our expertise out there to share with the next generation of nutritionists. But today we're here to talk about the new products from FeedWorks and the monogastrics and that is e. And we're talking around antioxidant stress. Can we start out with what you've seen

0:12:08
(Casey Bradley)
as a production nutritionist with oxidative stress and how that hinders performance, mortality,

0:12:17
(Casey Bradley)
welfare and things in the animal?

0:12:18
(Tommy S.)
Yeah, I mean, like I said, in my days in working with, well, starting with working with Smithfield, even down in Mexico where we had a group and this was a group that was in the desert part of Mexico, south of Tucson. And believe it or not, you can raise pigs there, but it's a challenge. And heat stress was always a challenge. And one of the ways we worked around that is, luckily, fat was very cheap down there.

0:12:50
(Tommy S.)
So I mean, if I could put 5-6% fat in there, I'd do that just to try to, you know, basically make a cooler diet, so to speak. And that seemed to help. And we actually did that in North Carolina. We actually did it in the Midwest. But as we know, in the last couple of three years,

0:13:08
(Tommy S.)
fat's gotten where the price of it has been a little prohibitive far as running real high levels. And it was one of those things on the East Coast. We still ran higher levels, but I always used a rule of thumb

0:13:23
(Tommy S.)
that a fat was more than three, three and a half times price of corn. You probably need to start thinking about sliding it out far as the benefits you get. It was gonna cost you more for that improvement feed conversion.

0:13:35
(Tommy S.)
And about three, three and a half times was that typical cost, but that's not taken into account other things such as, you know, are you tight on space, this type of thing. So like at Smithfield, we actually would run a little higher, you know, maybe not 6% or 5% like we had in the past, but we run lower levels.

0:13:59
(Tommy S.)
And but we still ran some because that was one thing that we always try to do is try to maintain growth in a hot, humid North Carolina summer. In the Midwest, we didn't, but kind of where I'm getting to with the eLife product is one of the things that we started looking at when I left Smithfield

0:14:19
(Tommy S.)
and started doing some consulting work with Feedworks, one of the new products that they wanted me to do some technical consulting on was this product called Elife, which is just a combination of polyphenols and it's produced in Belgium

0:14:36
(Tommy S.)
by a company called Impex Traco. And basically, far as the polyphenols that are in the product, it mimics kind of what you call the Mediterranean diet. So I mean, it's going to have extracts from grapes and olives and avocados and tomatoes

0:14:52
(Tommy S.)
and all that kind of stuff. And the nice thing is, is there's about 20 to 25 different polyphenols in the product. And there's several products out there that have some grapeseed extract, maybe some other polyphenols as well. So polyphenols in their use

0:15:12
(Tommy S.)
has not been necessarily a new thing, but because today we're looking at it, trying to lower heat stress like during the summer for as like with sows, far as breed backs, all this, your typical heat stress type issues. Well, one of the things that I started looking at

0:15:34
(Tommy S.)
when I was looking at eLife and how to position it was basically, well, as a production nutritionist, one thing I've always done is I've tried to pay for, if I get a new product, is there a way for me to pay for it? You know, and a good example would be, you know, of course, phytase, you get phosphorus,

0:15:55
(Tommy S.)
but you may also get some energy release. Or, you know, if you really want to split hairs, you might get a little bit of improvement and protein digestibility or something like that. Whatever that is that you want to use or matrix that you want to use, is there a way I can actually pay for this ingredient? Well, one of the things that I was thinking of with eLife,

0:16:17
(Tommy S.)
and like I said, it's not an original thought, other people have come up with this, was, you know, of course we know vitamin E50 has gotten real, real expensive in diets. And is there a way to, you know, basically partially replace part of that vitamin E with polyphenols because a good part of the vitamin E that's fed

0:16:39
(Tommy S.)
gets oxidized, it's used as an antoxidant. Because if you ask a lot of people what vitamin E is in the body, they say it's an antioxidant. Well, it's actually more than that. Of course, we know it has a vitamin component and polyphenols obviously will not take the place of that.

0:16:56
(Tommy S.)
But there's a certain proportion of that 30 IUs per pound or 40 or whatever of vitamin E that you feed that's gonna be oxidized. Now how much that is, a colleague of mine, a colleague, a former colleague of mine and myself, we just kind of did a rule of thumb of 50%.

0:17:14
(Tommy S.)
That may be 25% high or low, I don't know, you know. But I said, well, that's probably not a bad number. So in other words, if you feed 30, you're probably only getting about 15 of vitamin E. So what I was talking about doing is, if you're feeding a level higher than either NRC

0:17:35
(Tommy S.)
or whatever level that your genetic company recommends, say it's 30 IUs and you're feeding 40, you could easily replace that 10 overage with e-life and depending on how you formulate it in, you can actually do it at worse the same cost and get a higher percentage of antioxidant activity in the form of vitamin E equivalents. So anyway, that was kind of one of the products I wanted to talk about is that,

0:18:10
(Tommy S.)
and like I said, we've used it. It's been very well accepted or implemented in a lot of dairies. A lot of dairies that FeedWorks works with, been successful there. We're in the process of getting it started

0:18:29
(Tommy S.)
with one pretty good size group of sows. So basically it's gonna be kind of a testing period because I mean, like I said, most people, if you start saying replace vitamin E, I'm always careful with that. You're not replacing the vitamin E, you're just replacing the antioxidant properties. So in other words, if you go from 40 to 30, you still will meet the spec for that genetic

0:19:02
(Tommy S.)
company, because NRC is 20 on sales. So and some people say well maybe you can go down to 20 and you probably could but the NRC data is very old.

0:19:11
(Casey Bradley)
I was going to say no.

0:19:13
(Tommy S.)
So usually what I try to do is I try to like if you know like a lot of the sales I fed were PIC so I would just follow PIC recommendations and you know whatever whatever whatever I'm talking about, it's usually where I tried to either, those saying is meet or exceed. So I would either meet or exceed

0:19:32
(Tommy S.)
the genetic company recommendations. And of course, a lot of their recommendations were determined by nutritionists, what they were feeding, but I mean, some of it was based on, some of the stuff was based on research as well.

0:19:46
(Tommy S.)
But anyway.

0:19:47
(Casey Bradley)
Well, I was going to say it's unfortunate, you know, Dr. Mahan is still not here doing a lot of the original requirement on vitamin E and, you know, it would have been cool to

0:19:57
(Casey Bradley)
see him take it a little further to truly understand that proportion.

0:20:01
(Tommy S.)
Yeah, because I actually worked with him when I was at ADM on natural vitamin E. And because you know, you remember back when he probably took your first nutrition course like I did and you got to the vitamin E part of nutrition, your nutrition book, it always said required for reproduction in rats.

0:20:21
(Tommy S.)
And if it talked about natural, it said 1.36 times the amount. And I'll tell you, based on some of the work that Dr. Mahan did, and this is going back 20 years ago now, almost, when I was at ADM, but 1.36 was way too low. And some people use 1.5 now, but there was some tissues that was well over twice, twice the level, like brain and lung.

0:20:48
(Tommy S.)
I remember the brain and the lung were over two, but I've always used, depending on cost, but one and a half, 1.75, I've always felt very comfortable when I used natural vitamin E. But yeah, he was good to work with.

0:21:05
(Casey Bradley)
Yeah, the vitamin expert in my mind and trace mineral gentleman. Speaking of trace minerals, you also have a copper product for anamine that you're working with.

0:21:17
(Tommy S.)
Yeah, it's a product called KORUJ. It's actually a monovalent copper oxide. And people think of copper oxide, they're really, they typically think of copper two oxide and this is actually the reduced form monovalent. So, and the funny thing is, is the big,

0:21:37
(Tommy S.)
well, it's not funny, but the difference is copper oxide is black in color, where Kourouge is red. Looks, I mean, it's almost blood red. And then, of course, copper sulfate's kind of that bluish green color. So the neat thing is every one of them are different colors,

0:21:55
(Tommy S.)
but based on a lot of the data that's been done internally at Anamine, we're in the process of wrapping a study up right now with nursery pigs, but all the data that's been out looks like you can get equivalent response with about 100 parts per million copper from monovalent copper chloride, I mean copper oxide, as you can, 150 tbcc or 200 to 250 copper sulfate.

0:22:23
(Tommy S.)
That's not saying the other two don't work, they all work. And I would say they all work pretty equal with respect to feed conversion response. The question is, if you start looking at the efficiency of that three to five points of feed conversion that you can pick up, you know, 100 parts per million copper is one is a smaller footprint. And the other thing I always liked about it is just the space it takes in the diet. And I actually gave a presentation at DPP here two weeks ago, and that was actually two or three of

0:23:00
(Tommy S.)
my slides was just flipping up slides from my concept five of what each one of these ingredients look like in a diet because while some in there were probably production nutritionist or nutritionists that actually formulate a diet a lot of them are probably more biochemist and and really didn't know and basically what I was showing was if you put copper sulfate in it's about a two pound inclusion in a diet. And the reason I went to TBCC a long time ago when I was at Smithfield was,

0:23:32
(Tommy S.)
one, I could put 150 parts per million copper in and get the same response as I could with 200 or 250, but it also saved me a pound and a half of space. And then, you know, how much is that space worth? Depends on what you fill it with. Well, same thing with the CoRouge product. Started using it in the nurseries because the data showed I could get the same response

0:23:53
(Tommy S.)
with 100 parts per million, and it saved me another quarter pound. So, you know, basically I go from two pound inclusion product down to a half pound inclusion product, is TBCC to a quarter pound and get the same response. And then now you're getting down to a size where you can actually put that in your

0:24:10
(Tommy S.)
pre-mix. Exactly. And you don't have then I don't have to have that extra ingredient in the mill. So there was that was some of the points I was trying to make in this that you know probably are not thought of in a basic research or setting is, I could take that ingredient, add to feed mill, so that's got a value. And there's a less chance for a mess up. I could, I mean, that's like phytase.

0:24:34
(Tommy S.)
I put phytase in premixes just because it's just another ingredient to get out of the mill because it doesn't matter how big the mill is, you never have enough micro bins. So never enough, never enough micro bins, but no, the TBC, I mean, the copper oxide,

0:24:51
(Tommy S.)
monovalent copper oxide product is been, you know, a good product. And what we've seen in just in our, you know, in our field type studies is I've told people in late nurseries, to me it's performed every time just like any other copper source would be

0:25:14
(Tommy S.)
at that 100 parts per million level. The debate becomes once you get into the grow finish side, do you go all the way, do you go to 150 pounds, do you not feed any? And then that's where that has to end up being. I was talking with a nutritionist earlier today about it. I said that really becomes a question on where you're at with your fat levels and your diet

0:25:37
(Tommy S.)
and what kind of heat stress you're going to have, these type of things. To whether or not, in his situation, I was like thinking about 150 pounds would be about the maximum you would get any benefit out of from a growth standpoint. But the nice thing about, well, when I used to feed pigs on the East Coast,

0:25:56
(Tommy S.)
we actually got a response from copper all the way through, partly because as you feed an elevated level of copper, the body is gonna, well, I always like to say these metals are all chaperoned around the body to keep from misbehaving.

0:26:09
(Tommy S.)
And-

0:26:10
(Casey Bradley)
You know, Fred Madison, right?

0:26:11
(Tommy S.)
Yes, yes.

0:26:12
(Tommy S.)
Yep. And that's part of the line. And I never shy away from saying I learned from Fred. But they're basically all chaperoned around. And then anything extra is excreted via the bowel. So if you're feeding higher levels of fat,

0:26:28
(Tommy S.)
you can actually get an improvement. And I think you actually pick up a little feed conversion in those times. Yeah, and like I said, you feed it out in the Midwest, I think that's one where you just have to do your own trials and see if it's worth looking at it all the way from say over 150 pounds on. And it's probably,

0:26:50
(Tommy S.)
it's just going to depend. But as far as in the nurseries, I tell folks, I said, I don't even blink. It works there. And then in the finishing, I think it really kind of depends on, especially if you're under heat stress yet, it's gonna work, you know, at 100 versus, you know, at 100 versus 150, because a lot of people, you know, will use TBCC actually further out finishing

0:27:14
(Tommy S.)
than I thought they would. And I think it's caught on more because of, you know, shortness of space or whatever, just trying to keep pushing average daily gain. Because that was one of the big things we ran into is we just, you know, even though feed conversion was important, once we got into the summer, gain became important. But yeah, that's that product, and it's called Kourouge by Anamine. And the nice thing is, is you can feed less,

0:27:40
(Casey Bradley)
which means we're going to have less in the soil. Yes. It's just a benefit as well. Yeah. I mean, that's my only challenge of recommending feeding copper all the way through the finisher, especially if you use a sulfate, is that, you know, the, we can't, corn can't pull

0:27:54
(Casey Bradley)
copper out of the soil like it can pull zinc.

0:27:56
(Tommy S.)
Right.

0:27:57
(Tommy S.)
So, it's a balancing act as well from an environmental perspective. Yeah, and that's where people have to decide what works best in their system and all, but far as does it work as good as, yes. But here again, is it enough to feed it all the way through? I think that becomes an individual decision. And whether or not you're, you know, you're, you know, you know, the Midwest and the Southeast are different. In the Southeast, we got more lagoons. And of course, everything settles and they spread, but eventually one day you got to do something with it. Yeah. And, but, you know, with the pits

0:28:40
(Tommy S.)
you have in the Midwest where they actually inject might be more of a consideration.

0:28:46
(Casey Bradley)
Well, thank you very much, Tommy.

0:28:48
(Casey Bradley)
It was good to catch up with you again at Whirlpork.

0:28:50
(Tommy S.)
Yeah, same here.

0:28:51
(Tommy S.)
Thank you.

0:28:52
(Casey Bradley)
Hi, we're here live at Whirlpork Expo with a veterinarian. I'm a nutritionist. We were just talking about this, the line in the sand. So I'm going to try to ask some intelligent questions for a veterinarian, Dr. Megan Boland. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. Megan, can you introduce us to Norbrook and your role and kind of your background in this one industry? Absolutely. So Norbrook is a family owned

0:29:19
(Casey Bradley)
company based out of Northern Ireland and we manufacture lots of sterile injectables and porons and both companion animal and food animal products but export to over 120 countries globally and the company has been in business for a long time, since like 1980 something. It's a well-known respected brand. We make all kinds of products for food animals and swine specifically as well. So today I think we're just going to talk about one of those injectable antibiotics.

0:29:51
(Casey Bradley)
My role, actually, I should talk about that. I am one of the technical services veterinarians for Norbrook focused on food animal and swine specifically. We have a team of five veterinarians and also a sales team and all the other departments

0:30:07
(Fredrik S.)
as well.

0:30:08
(Fredrik S.)
And no need for a nutritionist.

0:30:09
(Casey Bradley)
No, not yet at least.

0:30:10
(Casey Bradley)
Not yet, right? I know one. Well, we're going to talk about a product that is very similar to Exinel, but I heard it's actually better, Cefinel with you. So kind of talk about how we use Cefinell and why it's better. Well, I'll get to that. Okay, so a little background. We all know PRRS, right?

0:30:32
(Fredrik S.)
Yeah. PRRS virus was kind of the bane of our existence for the past almost 40 years, right? It's usually followed kind of a seasonal pattern in terms of the cold winter months, it kind of rears its head and then it'll go down in the summertime. But in the last several years that's really changed a lot and it's more prevalent year-round. You can find a farm all the time that's positive for PERS. So it's a virus that mutates just like influenza virus. It likes to mutate, it likes to evade our immune system and our biosecurity measures and find different ways to hide out and stuff. And so we've got to become smarter than that virus.

0:31:08
(Fredrik S.)
The other thing with viruses is that they usually come with a secondary bacterial co-infection. So they kind of set up shop and then you've got these secondary bacteria that come in and really cause a lot more problems. And it's like I was telling someone yesterday, it's like a co-infection isn't just one plus one equals two. It's like one plus one equals ten sometimes when it comes to the financial impact.

0:31:27
(Fredrik S.)
And so how that is important to Norbrook and where we come into play is that we have a portfolio of injectable antibiotics that are labeled for treatment and control of bacterial swine respiratory disease. So for cephanil specifically, it's labeled for four of our common bacterial co-infections ATP, Actin Basillus, Pyridomoniae, Pasturella Multacida, Salmonella, and Straftococcus Sueus. So I know a lot of producers are familiar with those terms.

0:31:57
(Fredrik S.)
So the point is when we have a PERS outbreak, there are certain things we can do to control the secondary co-infections or tertiary or whatever. Co-infections and there's in-feed antibiotics, there's water antibiotics, and then there's our injectable antibiotics. And so that's where we come into play. It's an individual animal treatment, it's sterile injectable, it is a bioequivalent to XNLRTU, like you were talking about. So it's actually the only, the first and only generic safety if you're available

0:32:30
(Fredrik S.)
for livestock on the market. And so we actually have internal studies comparing syringability between the Pioneer product and our bioequivalent product and ours actually showed to be superior in terms of being more syringable, which obviously is good for the producers and the caretakers in the farm. And the people who have carpal tunnel now because of all the shots and

0:32:53
(Fredrik S.)
processing I've done in my life. That's right, that's right. Anything we can do to make it a little bit more user-friendly. So another benefit of Cefanil is that when we talk about like marketing our coal sows or our market animals, it's only got a four day meat withdrawal time. So, it's big, it's very convenient. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of having that flexibility and not worrying about, oh, I need to put her on a truck or, you know, market this barn. So, short meat withdrawal time, it is a multiday treatment. So whereas some of our injectable antibiotics are single treatment, Sentinel is actually a multi-day treatment, which is you would think is a downfall, but it's actually beneficial because it allows those

0:33:31
(Fredrik S.)
caretakers to look at that animal for today, tomorrow, the next day, and actually monitor that response to treatment and make sure she's actually making progress. So let's go into some basics for potentially producers or technicians watching this. What is a good percentage of pigs in your mind, so we got a PRRS positive bird, we break, let's use strap is it the same bull? What is the percentage of pigs that should get an injectable treatment in that situation?

0:34:03
(Fredrik S.)
Well it's not an easy answer. Well, yeah, there's a lot of things. It depends. And it depends on your resources that you have. Say your labor. That's probably going to be the biggest factor. The finances that you have is going to help you decide,

0:34:17
(Fredrik S.)
like, do you want to go in the water, or do you want to do a mass med with an injectable? And so a veterinarian takes that into account. They base a lot of their decision on the history of that flow and what pathogens they know are going to rear their head at specific time points.

0:34:34
(Fredrik S.)
And so if they know it's going to spread to that entire barn and they need to get on it quick, they'll probably use a water one because it's going to get in there and you want to keep them drinking and so you want to you want to get that in there quick if it's something that may be a little bit more slower spreading you could go in and you could

0:34:50
(Fredrik S.)
treat a whole pin for example with an injectable and then you could come up come back later with a water medication if you need it to but there's some some cases where you would want to go in and you would want to treat an entire barn injectively. And I've done that before too, and it's not necessarily fun, but sometimes it's necessary, but there's just a lot of things. And that's where I always refer producers back to their vet, is that they're going to be able to make that best decision for that specific case, depending on the susceptibility of that pathogen to specific antibiotics, because we know there's a lot of resistance happening out there too. And so if we can target that treatment to be the most successful

0:35:28
(Fredrik S.)
outcome possible, that's what we're gonna do. Yeah. And the other thing I find when I audit different things is the same pig getting treated multiple times. Where do you kind of draw that line of that, you know, next day treatment? How many days do you give that pig to say it's not worth an injectable? And we have PQA standards here in the US that says what, about three days I think, if I remember right. I should know. About three days to say, well,

0:35:58
(Fredrik S.)
that I need to euthanize that pig. How do you determine making that decision with Cefanil on continuous treatment? That's a good question. And Cefanil specifically wouldn't necessarily be used for those younger, like nursery pigs. I would probably choose a different treatment for them. But if we're talking about more of our grower, the finisher, or sows, and adult animals, Cefanil would be a good choice for those,

0:36:26
(Fredrik S.)
just because of the dosing on that. But back to your question. So when you think about animal welfare, is this animal gonna respond to treatment? Do we have the right treatment that we're giving it? And if not, we need to monitor that quickly

0:36:40
(Fredrik S.)
and maybe switch antibiotics if we've chosen the wrong one. And so that's where it kind of like, what class of antibiotic and the antibiotic susceptibility of that specific pathogen. If we can get diagnostics on that animal, that'll be the most helpful thing.

0:36:55
(Fredrik S.)
That's a vet, a swine vet is always gonna want diagnostics on something so that we know exactly what we're facing and what we need to put in there to fix that problem. And so ideally we pick the correct antibiotic to start with and that pig responds to treatment and we can move it out of the sick pen back with the rest of them. It gets back on feed and water and it grows. If we don't see that happen, maybe we've missed

0:37:18
(Fredrik S.)
something, maybe there's a lameness issue that we haven't, you know, maybe we haven't assessed the full picture. So really getting your eyes on those animals in that pen, getting in the barn and looking at what's happening. Maybe it's an air quality thing. Maybe it's an environmental thing. Maybe it's not a pathogen that's causing these problems.

0:37:36
(Fredrik S.)
And so that's why I said it depends. There's lots of different factors that go into it and you know that. But yeah, animal welfare is always our number one goal. So if that animal's not responding to treatment in a timely manner, we need to do the right thing and put that animal out of its misery. Right. So yeah. Well obviously we've talked about in-feed additives, water additives on medications and that price tag can keep going up. Oh yeah. One of the things Norbrook talks about with

0:38:04
(Fredrik S.)
your product is the affordability of using this and can you kind of talk about I guess a baseline cost of using Cefanil over some other options in feed water or other injectables? Yeah, so that's one of the, you know, for any of the bio-cobalt companies out there that have products, that's really one of the benefits of having them is that, you know, usually the price point can be lower than the pioneer offers. And so it's going to depend, your price point's going to depend based on your distributor that you go through or whatever it may be. So I can't necessarily speak to that but it's going to be lower than your pioneer in

0:38:39
(Fredrik S.)
general. And so that's good because it helps those producers stretch their treatment budget, whatever that, because it gets down to the penny, right? How many cents is it going to cost to treat these animals? And so just know that in general, bio-acclimatized product is going to stretch your treatment budget further. It's going to be just as safe, just as effective, because we have the same exact standards when we get these products approved by the FDA. Well, since we talked about PERS, PERS has been a pain in my butt all my career. Do we have any hope of mitigating this or will it? Well, obviously with PIC and the PERS-resistant painkiller, you know, that's good news, but there's other stuff that's going to rear its head.

0:39:25
(Fredrik S.)
I don't think that's my well, I can see both sides of the story here because I know that PIC has been working on this for a long time. It hasn't happened overnight and they've gotten FDA approval for this purse resistant, which I think is great. I think it's still to be determined what the widespread acceptance and uptake of it is going to be.

0:39:48
(Fredrik S.)
And I think we'll see a lot of that in the next few years. How quickly is this going to ramp up at all? I think it's a great way to fight PRRS because everything we've done so far, it's found a way around it, basically. Antibiotics don't treat PERS, they treat the secondary infections. Vaccines can help prevent the severity of disease. They don't prevent the disease to start with.

0:40:10
(Fredrik S.)
They can help stabilize a herd and help you recover quicker. But even then, this virus has evaded everything and it's lasting longer. It's harder to eliminate. And we see a lot more D-pop, repops anymore because the severity of some of these PERS strains are just, they're too much to deal with. So I have hope for the genetic side because we haven't tried that aspect yet but I do think it'll take a while for it

0:40:34
(Fredrik S.)
to be widely accepted if it is at all. Yeah and like I said I've lived through pseudo rabies, we call it APP now, I've seen that and some really bad stuff. So I got a lot of dead pigs. And what my concern is, if we do eliminate it, what else? Right, and that was my other concern, is that if it's not purrs, what else will it be? Because we know, like with the New World screwworm coming back, and cattle, right?

0:41:02
(Fredrik S.)
That's in Mexico right now. In Texas, they're talking about Texas and New Mexico shutting the border down. And that doesn't affect just cattle. It can affect humans. It can affect anyone. So there's always another disease knocking on the door. So behind PERS there will be something else. It's just a matter of what and when. Well we can use disease as an example and I always

0:41:24
(Fredrik S.)
like to get this point of view. ASF was such a hot topic four or five years ago, right? We've been able to keep that out. But why can't we stop first? It's a good question. I don't have the answer for that.

0:41:40
(Fredrik S.)
It's just, yeah, it's been around since the 80s when it was known as mystery swine disease. No, and it just continues to change itself and mutate. And that's why I think the genetics, the genetically resistant pigs may be the answer, but at the same time you just worry about what may tag along with that, with those genetics that we don't know about yet. And I've talked to an MD science researcher

0:42:14
(Fredrik S.)
that's really, he is diving into what we used to call the junk DNA, and he calls it ancestral DNA. It was from viruses originally. And so he's got me thinking, if we turn that off,

0:42:28
(Casey Bradley)
what will we turn on?

0:42:29
(Casey Bradley)
Like, are there linked genes somehow? And I'm assuming, I haven't had a chance to talk to PIC in depth on it, but I'm excited for biotechnology.

0:42:38
(Fredrik S.)
It's just, I think it's the consumer.

0:42:41
(Casey Bradley)
I think that's the wild card. Yeah, well, and that's the packers concerns too now because they are the ones that are going to have to say yes we will take these pigs from you or no we won't. And we already know about the castration issues in the U.S. and not wanting to go that road either. Yeah we've seen this before with other other technologies and it really just comes down to the consumer and really the consumer outreach and education and letting them know that this is safe pork, right?

0:43:06
(Casey Bradley)
It's not going to be, it's not going to cause any problems. It's going to taste the same. The animals are still treated the same way, like caretakers still take care of them. I think the consumer and the consumer education, which the Pork Board and NPPC are working on, and EIC I know probably has some messaging too as well, but the consumer is really gonna drive, I think, the speed of the uptake that we see

0:43:28
(Casey Bradley)
that is genetically resistant to. Well, thank you so much for having us.

0:43:33
(Fredrik S.)
Yeah, absolutely.

0:43:34
(Fredrik S.)
Nice to meet you, it's great to be here.

0:43:37
(Casey Bradley)
I'm so happy to finish my World Pork Expo with you.

0:43:40
(Casey Bradley)
Thank you. It's been a long time since we've got to talk again. I know.

0:43:45
(Fredrik S.)
It's a long time. We've known each other for quite a while.

0:43:47
(Casey Bradley)
Yeah, and you're not even in the U.S. anymore.

0:43:49
(Fredrik S.)
No, I know.

0:43:50
(Fredrik S.)
I know. The wonders of remote work.

0:43:52
(Casey Bradley)
Exactly. So, we're obviously here for your launch of Feed Armor.

0:43:56
(Casey Bradley)
Can you introduce the thought process behind Feed Armor and how it came about into the

0:44:02
(Fredrik S.)
market? Yeah, so feed mitigation is obviously a very big piece and we've been looking to develop a feed mitigants that would be as effective as the gold standard, which is formaldehyde, but at the same price point or less. And when that first was asked of me as a researcher, I thought that they were crazy, because formaldehyde is a very long track record. But we used an existing research program on some other products and combined it with some

0:44:33
(Fredrik S.)
more developments and we were able to develop FeedArmor. And here back over the winter, we're able to prove that it could actually be equal to formaldehyde.

0:44:43
(Casey Bradley)
So can you explain the research you've done to get this to be equal, if not better, than formaldehyde?

0:44:49
(Fredrik S.)
Yeah, so I would definitely say that the way we designed the research, we can say that it's equal. So Dr. Scott D. developed the Ice Cube Challenge model and conducted this in five VCL2 rooms. And we had a negative control. We had a positive control, which was six and a half pounds per ton of formaldehyde, and then two, four, and six pounds per ton of feed armor. And then Scott did the regular ice cube challenge.

0:45:23
(Fredrik S.)
And we actually, we were using sows instead of growing pigs like the early Big Mig trials. And we tracked these sows for 27 days. And over those 27 days, we saw a clear clinical disease of PDV personcenica in the sows that were in the non-mitigated feed. But in all of the mitigated feed we had no disease whatsoever. And from that we were able to look at both the overall picture as well as the recovery of iris and the saliva that two pounds per ton of feed armor is really equivalent to using formaldehyde. And that was Dr. D's conclusion.

0:46:02
(Casey Bradley)
Well, I was going to say there's some advantages of not using formaldehyde and that was Dr. D's conclusion. Well I was gonna say there's some advantages of not using maldehyde and going with a product like FeedArmor and what are some of those advantages?

0:46:10
(Fredrik S.)
Yeah I think the FeedArmor has some handling restrictions. There are some potential safety concerns. I know that that's a different people have different opinions on this but as we look at NFPA ratings and safety and those types of things, feed armor is a very, very large difference in maldehyde in terms of handling risk for people in our mills as well as equipment and those types of things.

0:46:40
(Casey Bradley)
Well, when we look at the core ingredients, high-intensity mitigation, more of a certification approach, we're getting more than just disease control.

0:46:49
(Casey Bradley)
We're actually probably getting sub-performance value as well.

0:46:53
(Fredrik S.)
Yeah, Casey, that's very important, is that we have to look at the bigger picture of mitigants for the exact reason that you mentioned. I presented a paper at A ASV this year, which looked at feed armor and the impact it's had on prolapses in some cases. We didn't expect that. We didn't, that was not what we were looking for at all.

0:47:16
(Fredrik S.)
But we switched the customer from another mitigan to feed armor and we saw a drop in prolapses.

0:47:20
(Casey Bradley)
Wow.

0:47:21
(Fredrik S.)
But the biggest thing really is where we see the most nutritional value of FeedArmor is number one, it's only two pounds per ton, so that reduces the energy dilution of the diet and that has some value, especially in diets when we're formulating to an energy level. But then secondly, FeedArmor has actually been proven to improve feed intake, where many other organic acid products, actually some of them can show negative feed intake.

0:47:58
(Casey Bradley)
Do you see this going on past Sows? Because you're getting a performance boost from the different assets and then also being able to save on tonnage and finishing things and things and herd zones.

0:48:13
(Fredrik S.)
At this point in time, we're really targeting feed armor for feed mitigation. So that would be lactation, gestation, yield developers, nursery pigs that are on the sow farm.

0:48:24
(Fredrik S.)
And we're

0:48:25
(Fredrik S.)
really focusing to that area with FeedArmor.

0:48:28
(Casey Bradley)
Well great, well thank you and if you people want to learn more about FeedArmor that aren't here at World Pork because obviously everybody's leaving, how do

0:48:35
(Casey Bradley)
they reach out to you?

0:48:37
(Fredrik S.)
Yeah they can reach out to us through FeedArmor.com or through McNest.com and yeah and I guess I didn't mention but it's helpful to mention a feed armor at two pounds per ton and it's only five dollars less than five dollars a ton of treated feed so it's 4.70 a treated ton of feed which is a very very very viable option that way treated feed so it's 4.70 a treated ton of feed which is a very very very viable option that way

0:48:59
(Fredrik S.)
I forgot to mention that so but I wanted to make sure I mentioned that. Thank you so much.