28 April 2025

3 minute read

By: Sarah Mikesell

North America

Kristin Kasselman, senior vice president of Livestock and Equine at Zoetis, recently spoke to The Cattle Site’s Sarah Mikesell in San Antonio, Texas at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association annual meeting, CattleCon.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kristin, tell us about your new role and your history at Zoetis.

I've had the opportunity to work across our livestock business in many different areas. I have been with a company for 25 years, and this is an incredible opportunity to be able to further support our customers and bring innovative solutions that positively impact both animal health and productivity.

In my new role, I lead our livestock business which is cattle, pork, poultry and equine. I have the responsibility for technical services, sales and marketing.

How important is the role of innovation and research for current products and new ones in the pipeline?

Innovation is incredibly important to us, and it's at the core of everything we do. We are very blessed to have a portfolio that spans the continuum of care, so it allows us to predict, prevent, detect and treat disease.

We play in spaces such as vaccines, parasiticides, implants, antibiotics, genetics and biodevices. We're very committed to continuing to evolve our products and services to ensure that we are meeting the needs of our customers, and we're also able to help them positively impact their animal health as well as productivity and the efficiency of their operations.

Ongoing research is something that we are extremely focused on and committed to. In 2024, we invested $614 million in R&D, and this allows us to continue to innovate and bring fresh solutions to our customers.

We have challenged ourselves to define innovation differently. Instead of it just being a new product launch, we define it as doing something different that has impact. That could be a product, but it could also be the support of a product or the services that come along with the product.

What are some of Zoetis’ biggest accomplishments in the past year?

We were able to innovate our Synovex implant line, bringing a new product to market. We were also able to bring new re-implant label claims. We launched Valcor, which is the first dual ingredient internal parasite control for cattle in the US. We also recently received an import permit for turkey rhinotracheitis vaccine, allowing us to support poultry producers and veterinarians as they fight the emerging avian metapneumovirus in the US.

What are some of the opportunities and challenges you see for the industry and for Zoetis?

There is continued pressure on herd expansion with drought conditions and urban sprawl in some areas, and the average age of the US producer is not dropping. We know there have been significant labor resource challenges across all areas of the industry.

Some of the opportunities continue to be how cattle producers are embracing and implementing innovative technologies. It's also important for us to understand the impact that these animal health interventions have on sustainability and how we can help producers really be able to apply that information in a measurable way.

As an animal health company, some of our biggest opportunities are continuing to support our producers and veterinarians and how they can adopt innovative approaches and new management practices to better fit the needs of their individual operations.

Our teams are constantly collaborating with customers and bringing in our expertise from a technical and sales standpoint to make sure we understand: what are their goals and what are the ways that we can help support those goals?

As a larger cross-species organization, are there things that you can learn from each other?

This has been one of the biggest benefits in bringing all our different protein species under one livestock umbrella. The amount of passion and engagement that our colleagues have and their genuine curiosity to learn about each other's business has been very inspiring. It has really allowed us to evolve and increase our value proposition to the customer.