In this Feed Strategy Chat, Dr. Stacie Crowder, director of sales and technical innovation at Fortiva, discusses the company's innovative approach to livestock nutrition. As the additives division of Land O'Lakes, Fortiva rebranded from PMI in 2024 with a mission to deliver functional feed ingredients that enhance animal performance across multiple species.
Crowder explains how their products support animal resilience, improve biosecurity and provide strong returns for producers by optimizing gut health and immune function. This conversation offers valuable insights into how specialized feed technologies like Vitacy Feedlock are changing the livestock industry's approach to nutrition and disease management.
Interview with Dr. Stacie Crowder, director of sales and technical innovation at Fortiva
Jackie Roembke, editor-in-chief of WATT’s Feed Brands and Feed Strategy: Hi everyone, welcome to Feed Strategy Chat. I'm your host, Jackie Roembke, editor-in-chief of WATT’s Feed Brands and Feed Strategy.
This edition of Feed Strategy Chat is brought to you by Fortiva. Fortiva is moving beyond feed additives to create ingredients for impact that work with an animal's physiology to support resilience and health, with a focus on optimizing gut health, pre- and probiotics, phytogenics, rumen modifiers and more. Fortiva products help address real-world challenges across the livestock industry. Their collaborative approach and innovative solutions are setting new standards in animal nutrition.
For more information, visit www.fortivaimpact.com.
Today, we're joined by Dr. Stacie Crowder, the director of sales and technical innovation with Fortiva. She's here to tell us about some of the exciting things that the company is working on and what they are bringing to the livestock industry.
Hi, Stacie, how are you today?
Dr. Stacie Crowder, director of sales and technical innovation, Fortiva: I'm great. How are you doing?
Roembke: I’m doing well. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Let's get right into it. Can you tell us a little bit more about Fortiva and give us a little background about the company?
Crowder: Sure. Fortiva is the additives division within Land O’Lakes. We have had an additives group within the Land O’Lakes organization since 2015; your listeners might have previously known us as PMI. Just recently, in 2024, we rebranded to the name Fortiva, and that's significant because we evaluated the additive space, functional ingredients, and the connotation of just being an additives group as like a “last in, first out” kind of concept. We really wanted to make a commitment to all livestock producers — to commit to helping them push beyond the norm — and to think about additives as functional ingredients where they can multiply what's already in the diet. They're not extra when everything else is working great.
We're focused on bringing technologies that get more out of what you already have in the diet.
Roembke: Are Fortiva products geared toward one species more than others? Can you tell us a little bit more about the applications?
Crowder: Yes, so Fortiva is multispecies. We have ruminant and monogastric — we have dairy cattle, beef cattle, swine and poultry technologies. We do have technologies that work in a pet or a companion side as well, but we mostly focus on the livestock species.
Roembke: How does including Fortiva technologies in livestock rations provide the strong returns that producers are looking for?
Crowder: When we think about all of the products within our Fortiva product portfolio, we're really focused on kind of a compendium of animal resilience all the way to business resilience. Under the animal side, you're going to have animal performance — so any types of technologies that can get more out of the ingredients are going to have an average daily gain, feed conversion responses. Those show up under animal performance.
Then we also focus on health and immunity, and those products are beneficial to the immune system — so immune modulation or overall digestive health. Gut health and gut inflammation and those types of technologies move to the business side, which is going to give us risk management when we think about mycotoxin binders or those types of mitigation technologies you can put into feed to help the animal perform, as well as improve operational efficiency.
Any of our products that would have efficacy for feed conversion would have some operational efficiencies. When we think about a better use of resources than they already have, taking your feed dollar and helping you stretch that over more animals, we categorize that as an operational efficiency.
Roembke: Biosecurity has long been a top priority in the livestock industry and, especially in the last year, it has gained a lot more attention in the beef and dairy cattle sectors. How can Fortiva feed technologies be used to improve biosecurity?
Crowder: Yes, we've been focused in this area since about 2013, 2014, in the swine space. We had the entry of a disease, which was PEDv (porcine epidemic diarrhea virus), that we did not have prior, and we had a lot of questions as an industry: How did it get here? How is it spreading? During that time, there was a lot of great conversations being had, but we were really looking at biosecurity, a more of a holistic approach to operational biosecurity. Not just animal movement, people movement and equipment movement — but what's the risk that feed might have?
I've been a nutritionist for many years in the industry, and I can tell you, when I entered in the early 2000s, we did not think of feed in that way, so the topic of feed biosecurity really came to the forefront. This could be a way to help producers help animals.
Then I would say, in 2017 with certain medications being regulated under the VFD (veterinary feed directive), it made those conversations just kind of get sped up. We started learning about feed biosecurity. We really got a big push from the VFD so that we started having the nutritionists and the veterinarians working together.
And so this space of what can we do to feed the animal is more of a nutritional immunology type of conversation. We know that there are certain things that you can feed that changes the microbiome of the animal, that changes the way that animal responds to disease pressure. We took that same information and said, “Can we look at feed and say, are there things that we can put in the feed that we know will act on those pathogens, or that that disease pressure, whatever the disease might be?” And it's a little bit like a mycotoxin binder, right? There are mycotoxins that are potentially in the grain we feed, a binder that can attach to that and reduce animal performance loss or can reduce the impact on what the animal's production is when that's in the diet. If we think about this from an antiviral or antibacterial standpoint, are there technologies that we can employ in the feed? What we found was that some of our technologies do work in the feeder and continue to work in the animal.
Roembke: You’re speaking about biosecurity a lot. Is there a specific Fortiva product to meet to enhance biosecurity. Can you tell me a little bit about what that product's name and specifically what it does?
Crowder: Yes, the product that we would have in our product portfolio is called Vitacy Feedlock, and it's based on the technology of medium-chain fatty acids. How it works is it is a product that focuses on putting it into the diet. From the time that feed is manufactured before it reaches the animal, the product is already working.
The biggest benefit to Vitacy Feedlock that we see is the fact that it works beyond the feeder. In this space of feed biosecurity, we want to focus on technologies that not only just work in the feed, but we also want to elicit a response in the animal, if possible. And so that's some of the differences that the Vitacy Feedlock product offers producers: it works in the feed, but it also helps that animal’s immune system respond, and it's based on our medium-chain fatty acid technologies.
Roembke: What are the biggest opportunities for producers when incorporating specialized feed additives in livestock rations?
Crowder: That's a great question. I think the opportunities can be endless. It just depends on what we're targeting with those producers. I want you to think of that as we're looking for an intentional response in the animals. What is our goal? When we sit as a nutritionist across the table from a producer or a veterinarian that we're working with just to get a targeted response in the animal, what is it that we are actually targeting? Are we wanting to see better average daily gains? Are we wanting to see a performance-based metric, or are we really targeting what I refer to as this health and immunity space? Are we targeting gut inflammation? Are we targeting feed biosecurity? And then that will help us identify the specialized ingredient that we want to use, but it'll also help us understand, how do we evaluate if that technology working for the producer? What the (return on investment) for that producer is going to be will differ based on the technology.
To focus on feed biosecurity, in our product category, we utilize medium-chain fatty acids. There are different forms of the medium-chain fatty acids. So depending on the response that we want to target for the producer, or the opportunity that the producer has in front of them to utilize, that technology is going to depend upon the form in which we want to use the medium-chain fatty acids.
When we come to the in-the-feed concept, it needs to be in an activated state. So that's going to lead you to what form of the medium chain is effective in the feeder or post manufacturing before it actually reaches the animal versus maybe giving us a beyond-the-feeder impact. We're taking a concept of feed biosecurity and saying we're going to protect the feed. We're going to protect that if it would come in contact with a disease that could cause major mortality in your operation, it's going to work on that pathogen, but also it's going to work on modulating the immune system so that the animal actually recognizes, mounts a response to that disease and clears it before it does become a very large infection in your flock or in your herd.
Really, the opportunity is going to be dependent upon what is that targeted and intentional response we're targeting, and then that's going to lead us to the opportunity for each producer, and it's going to be different by species.
Roembke: Very good. Thank you so much, Dr. Crowder. If you'd like more information about what we spoke about today, both Fortiva and its products, please visit www.fortivaimpact.com.
Thank you again for your time, and thanks to you for tuning in.