World Pork Expo: Adisseo describes the benefits of feeding butyrate in nursey age pigs
Mark Giesemann is on a personal mission to make sure that every pig has butyrate
14 August 2025
3 minute read
By: Mark Giesemann, a Swine Technical Manager with Adisseo, spoke to The Pig Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, USA about the importance of getting baby piglets off to a good start.
Why is a good start for nursery pigs so important?
We know the growth rate of weaned pigs – that first week post-weaning – is very highly correlated with how heavy they are when they leave the nursery and it’s also correlated with how heavy they are at the end of the finishing period. To maximize throughput through the systems, it's especially important that we get the pig off to a good start. It will set him up to have a good nursery age period which sets him up to have a good grow-finish performance as well. More weight in that first week of post-weaning means more weight going out the end of the grow-finish barn, which is money in a producer’s pocket, especially with summertime prices.
What solution does Adisseo have to address this issue?
Although we have many solutions, we want to talk about butyrate today. It's a four carbon unit fatty acid, and it serves as an energy source for the enteritis – the cells in the gut. It also has many other positive effects on the gut health of , not only in the upper gastrointestinal tract, but also with our Ultramix C, which is our coated product. It makes it all the way down to the end of the tract and can help those lower areas of the gastrointestinal tract as well, and it can have very positive benefits on gut health.
We have done a lot of work at Adisseo in terms of showing the benefits of butyrate in not only a coated form but in several forms. We offer three different forms of butyrate depending on what type of product that you're looking for in the marketplace. We know all these products have benefits for the young pig.
The message that we're trying to get out to producers is it doesn't matter where your price point is for butyrate. It doesn't matter whether you want a premium product or you're just looking for a commodity butyrate in the market, those products can help your pigs perform better in the marketplace. I'm on a personal mission to make sure that every pig has butyrate.
What does using butyrate really mean for the producer’s operation?
What it means is over 5% improvement in both average daily gain and feed efficiency for the nursery-age pig. You're going to get a heavier pig at the end of the nursery period, and you're going to get him there for less feed than you would if you didn't feed butyrate because it’s both an efficiency and a growth rate product.
