MetaFarms Inc., an information platform for agriculture based in Burnsville, Minn., announced that it has acquired Swine Management Services LLC (SMS) of Fremont, Neb., to expand its services portfolio.

SMS is an independent swine consulting company founded in 2002 by Ron Ketchem and Mark Rix that offers informative management tools for swine 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,” MetaFarms chief executive officer Chad Becker said. “The addition of SMS's capabilities will give our customers the ability to better leverage the insights of our platform.”

SMS provides information solutions to the swine industry to enable producers to make better decisions, apply best production practices and increase efficiency. SMS offers services in the areas of farm benchmarking, breed-to-wean reporting, growing pig benchmarking, carcass and genetic evaluation, training programs and consulting.

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, according to the announcement. 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,” Becker said. “The need for accurate, standardized, transparent production benchmarks are becoming more critical in the livestock production space and, combined with MetaFarms' product offerings, give swine producers the best solutions in the market to support their business goals.”

SMS will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of MetaFarms 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,” Ketchem said. "The partnership will allow us to continue to increase our focus on helping swine producers be more productive."

The transaction closed Sept. 30, 2019. Current SMS customers will see no disruption to their existing services and will continue to receive customer service from the SMS and MetaFarms teams, with SMS continuing to operate from its headquarters in Fremont, the announcement said. 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 well-being, we will continue to support SMS to ensure scalable, robust data platforms,” Becker said. “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 life cycle.”

MetaFarms, founded in 2000, provides tools, benchmarking and services that leverage data to optimize production and maximize profitability in the livestock industry. With innovation and expertise, MetaFarms provides insights into the multi-level performance of production through a suite of customer-centric programs to translate complex data sets to meaningful metrics.

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