World Pork Expo: McNess launches FeedARMOR
An all-natural feed mitigant designed to reduce the risk of swine disease transmission through contaminated feed
22 September 2025
2 minute read
By: Dr. Fredrik Sandberg, the Director of Research and Development at McNess, spoke to The Pig Site’s Sarah Mikesell at World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, USA about the launch of their new product, FeedARMOR.
Dr. Sandberg, tell me about the risk of disease transmission through contaminated feed.
It's an interesting problem because disease can enter a farm in many different ways. You have animals, people and air, but feed is a well-known published risk factor. For example, the work at Kansas State University and Dr. Scott Dee and many others have shown that feed can be a vector for disease.
What solutions does McNess offer to mitigate this risk?
We have developed, over a long period of time, a technology called FeedARMOR. FeedARMOR is a combination of organic acids, monoglycerides and natural extracts. We're very excited because it's shown to be highly effective against African swine fever virus (ASF), porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED), Seneca Valley virus A (SVA) and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).
What does your research show?
We are very excited to be able to work together with Dr. Scott Dee, who has led this area of research. We collaborated with him and used his Ice Cube Challenge model. We also had five BCL2 rooms with Pipestone Applied Research. We had a control; we had formaldehyde. Then we fed two, four and six pounds per ton of FeedARMOR. We were able to demonstrate that two pounds per ton of FeedARMOR gave complete protection against the three viruses (PRRS, PED, SVA) for 27 days of infection, which was basically making it equivocal to formaldehyde. That is very exciting because no one else has ever published that before.
What will be next for research with FeedARMOR?
We have research planned with some of the land grant universities to do more dose, time and temperature type work to make sure that we can make adequate recommendations for using FeedARMOR in the summer, in the winter and also depending on what kind of ingredients people are using to make sure that there are no interactions stopping the technology from working.
Biosecurity seems to be on everyone's mind with the current disease levels across species right now.
It's critical, and it's like a footstool. Feed is only one leg, but it only takes one leg to be broken for the footstool to fall over.
Sarah Mikesell
Sarah Mikesell grew up on a five-generation family farming operation in Ohio, USA, where her family still farms. She feels extraordinarily lucky to get to do what she loves - write about livestock and crop agriculture. You can find her on LinkedIn.
