Palmerston North, New Zealand. John Burford, founder of metal engraved plates manufacturer, Delta Plastics, meets dairy farmer, Brian Murphy. Together, the dynamic duo invents a flexible, plastic ear tag to identify livestock more reliably and efficiently.

The company is renamed Allflex, and the popularity of this innovative product spreads rapidly. A new plant is built in Palmerston North to cope with demand, while a network of distributors grows markets in Australia, the U.S. and Europe

Anticipating the growing interest – particularly in Europe – for animal identification, SFII, a French company, acquires Allflex. The next decade sees the consolidation of this industrial group go from strength to strength.

The BSE crisis strikes Europe, and traceability becomes a public concern for both food safety and animal welfare. Allflex launches a range of highly secure, tamperproof tags to support strict European regulations around double tagging of all newborn calves.

Australia becomes the first non-European country to implement an official identification scheme. The Australian authorities then choose Allflex to supply electronic tags for the country’s livestock.

Systems, designs and technology for animal identification are developing fast around the world. Allflex responds by strengthening its manufacturing and commercial presence in multiple countries – stretching from Poland to Brazil, and from Turkey to Argentina.

The Allflex Group invests heavily in the automation of tag production lines and electronic supply chains. It now works with over 2,000 collaborators, all focusing their efforts on helping the global livestock industry contribute to a safer food supply.

The following years see several important companies with deep roots in livestock identification join the Allflex family – OS ID, Destron Fearing, Merko, Cox & Ritchey, and Aleis, to name a few – strengthening the  Allflex Group’s offering of global solutions.

The Allflex Group enters the world of animal health monitoring and digital agriculture through the acquisition of SCR as a platform for the future. A forty-year-old company itself, SCR’s monitoring solutions provide producers with actionable, intelligent management tools for reproduction, nutrition, health and wellbeing of individual cows. Linking identification and traceability to monitoring, the field of Animal Intelligence is born.

Allflex is the Livestock portfolio of digital products within MSD Animal Health. Through its commitment to the Science of Healthier Animals®, MSD Animal Health offers veterinarians, farmers, pet owners and governments one of the widest ranges of veterinary pharmaceuticals, vaccines and health management solutions and services as well as an extensive suite of digitally connected identification, traceability and monitoring products.