Agtech company MetaFarms Inc. has acquired Swine Management Services LLC to expand its services portfolio. SMS is an independent swine consulting company founded in 2002 by Ron Ketchem and Mark Rix, based in Fremont, Neb., and serves producers across North America and Australia.

“With the addition of SMS and their experienced team, we’re able to consolidate and enhance our benchmarking tools,” says Chad Becker, MetaFarms chief executive officer. “The addition of SMS’ capabilities will give our customers the ability to better leverage the insights of our platform.”

The SMS approach leverages data to help swine producers dig deeper into their production insight to gain a competitive advantage in the ever more complex world of swine production. The Swine Smart Sow Analysis System, for instance, helps swine producers make decisions based on 25 years of historical production insight.

“Ron and Mark built a successful business focused on gaining production insight and actionable recommendations based on detailed swine production data,” says Becker. “The need for accurate, standardized, transparent production benchmarks are becoming more critical in the livestock production space and combined with MetaFarms product offerings, gives swine producers the best solutions in the market to support their business goals.”

SMS will join the MetaFarms family and operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary, while continuing to provide all its current analytic and consulting solutions to the swine industry.

“The SMS team looks forward to partnering with the MetaFarms team to bring a new level of technological sophistication to managing swine data,” says Ketchem. “The partnership will allow us to continue to increase our focus on helping swine producers be more productive.” 

The transaction closed Sept. 30. Current SMS customers will see no disruption to their existing services and will continue to receive world-class customer service from the SMS and MetaFarms teams. SMS will continue to operate from its headquarters in Fremont. Ketchem will serve as general manager of SMS and Rix will become director of operations for SMS.

“With more data being collected across all aspects of production and continued focus on health, nutrition and animal wellbeing, we will continue to support SMS to ensure scalable, robust data platforms,” says Becker. “We look forward to extending SMS insight to more producers in North America and worldwide, as well as expanding the focus of the insight to the entire swine production lifecycle.”

Source: MetaFarms Inc., which is solely responsible for the information provided, and wholly owns the information. Informa Business Media and all its subsidiaries are not responsible for any of the content contained in this information asset.