Allflex announced Friday it has acquired SCR Engineers Ltd., a Netanya, Israel, company focused on livestock monitoring and intelligent milking solutions.

SCR will operate independently, as part of the Allflex Group, helping producers use equipment and predictive analytics to improve productivity.

Company leaders view the acquisition as an important step to facilitate the adoption of effective and proven monitoring systems by North American producers.

"Through the years, Allflex has grown by developing individual animal identification tools and by acquiring organizations that provide producers with useful solutions," said Brian Bolton, president and CEO of Allflex USA.

Allflex acquisition of SCR Engineers will advance technologies for monitoring cow health, reproduction

"Adding SCR to Allflex is perhaps the most significant step we've taken to prepare for the future demands on producers as they strive to meet the needs of feeding a growing world population with limited resources and greater demands for accountability," Bolton said.

For five decades, Allflex has pioneered individual-animal identification as a herd-management tool. Its focus has been on products that create workable solutions in real-life conditions, starting with visual technologies, and growing to include electronic, radio-frequency and genomic solutions.

Today, Allflex operates in 80 countries, using its connections with livestock communities and its large-scale manufacturing capabilities to consistently introduce new, improved identification tools.

When established in 1976, SCR began innovating electromechanical devices for dairies, such as the industry's first automatic milk meter with no moving parts.

During the past 10 years, SCR has become the world leader in advanced cow-monitoring systems, providing useful data gathered by activity and rumination sensors. The company's sophisticated analysis algorithms convert the data into real-time reports that make it easy to detect heat, monitor health for individual animals, and provide useful group and herd performance information.

Collaborating to accelerate growth
"SCR brings an extensive network of partners who have experience with the on-farm implementation and support of state-of-the-art monitoring systems," Bolton said. "While these systems originally were developed for dairy cow monitoring, we believe their potential to efficiently monitor activity and illness indicators for the broader livestock market is extraordinary."

Tom Breunig, U.S. general manager for SCR, said the company is committed to becoming more effective at bovine reproduction, nutrition monitoring and earlier identification of sick or stressed cows.

"We also believe that combining tools from both companies will enable producers to integrate and optimize their on-farm information systems. By working together, we'll be able to customize comprehensive identification and monitoring solutions for producers of all sizes," Breunig said.

The acquisition is subject to customary regulatory review and approvals, with closing expected in early 2015.

Source: Allflex