Auditing a Dairy Herd’s Carbon Footprint From Its Collars Replacing the Human Estimator

This application covers a system and method for estimating greenhouse gas emissions in an environment housing an animal population, using data already collected by monitoring devices worn by individual animals. The applicants are SCR Engineers, an Israeli livestock monitoring pioneer, and the Spanish animal health arm of Merck.

The Problem

Livestock account for a substantial share of global greenhouse gas emissions, put by some estimates at around 14.5 percent. That has made farm level emissions figures commercially and regulatorily consequential, feeding into supply chain reporting, carbon accounting and increasingly into what processors pay.

The way those figures are currently produced does not match their importance. Emissions in an animal housing environment are mostly determined either by dedicated measurement instrumentation, which is expensive and rarely deployed, or by a human auditor forming an estimate. The auditor visits the facility, inspects it visually, gathers whatever data the operator happens to keep, and produces a number.

The specification is unusually candid about how weak that is. The data collection is slow, manual and error prone. Required data is often simply not available because nobody collected it. What is available is non-homogeneous, because different facility owners keep different records using different methods. And the auditor’s judgement is subjective in ways that are hard to correct for: the document singles out first impressions, noting that a facility making a good first impression may lead an auditor to overlook problems or weight them lightly, and the reverse for a poor one.

What This Invention Does

The system works from data that modern dairy operations already generate continuously. Monitoring devices, the collars and ear tags that track rumination, activity, feeding and health, monitor parameters of individual members of the animal population. A data repository holds records, each associated with a specific animal and containing that animal’s monitored parameters over time. Processing circuitry obtains a subset of those records and derives an emissions estimate from them.

The logic connecting the two is well established in the animal science literature even if the automation is not. Enteric fermentation, the digestive process that produces methane in ruminants, correlates with feed intake and rumination behaviour, which the collars measure directly. Herd level emissions also depend on fertility, health and longevity, since an animal that is sick, infertile or culled early emits without producing proportionate output. Those variables are exactly what the monitoring systems were built to track for entirely commercial reasons.

The related figures in the specification show welfare scoring components including a health score, an affectivity or happiness score and a natural living score, alongside a welfare key performance indicator module, indicating that the same per animal record set is being used for welfare assessment as well as emissions estimation.

Key Features

• Per animal monitoring devices. Parameters are captured for individual members of the population rather than for the herd in aggregate.
• Time series data repository. Each record is tied to a specific animal and holds its monitored parameters over time.
• Processing circuitry for estimation. A defined processing stage derives the greenhouse gas estimate from a subset of the stored records.
• Objective replacement for auditor judgement. The estimate is computed from measured data rather than from a site visit and subjective impression.
• Homogeneous data basis. Using a common monitoring platform removes the inconsistency that arises when each facility keeps its own records.
• Welfare indicator integration. The disclosed architecture includes welfare key performance indicators derived from the same per animal data.

Who Is Behind It

SCR Engineers Ltd began in Netanya, Israel in 1976 building electromechanical dairy equipment, including an early automatic milk meter with no moving parts, and became a leading supplier of cow monitoring systems whose algorithms detect heat, flag health problems and report herd performance in real time. It was acquired by Allflex, and the Allflex group in turn was bought by Merck in 2019 for approximately 2.37 billion United States dollars, placing it inside Merck Animal Health. The second applicant is Merck’s Spanish animal health entity.

The named inventors are Eran Genzel, Rotem Rabinovitz, Doron Bar and Juan Pedro Campillo Benéitez. The application is a divisional of Australian application 2024205151, itself a divisional of Australian patent 2022284388, the national phase of PCT/IL2022/050586.

Why It Matters

There is a pattern here worth noticing. The sensors were installed to solve production problems: catching a cow in heat, spotting mastitis early, managing the herd. They were paid for by milk yield. Now the same data stream is being repurposed for carbon accounting, which is a regulatory and reporting product rather than a production one, and it requires no new hardware on the farm.

That matters because emissions measurement has an awkward economics. Nobody wants to pay for instrumentation whose only output is a compliance number. Deriving the number from equipment installed for other reasons removes that objection entirely, and it is why the incumbent monitoring vendors are well placed in this market.

It also shifts what emissions figures can be used for. An auditor’s annual estimate is a snapshot. A continuously computed figure derived from live animal data can show whether a management change actually reduced emissions, which is the difference between reporting a footprint and managing one. For farmers facing processor requirements on carbon footprint, that distinction has direct financial consequences.

Related Concepts

• Enteric fermentation – the digestive process responsible for most livestock methane.
• Precision livestock farming – the sensor driven approach this system builds on.
• Carbon footprint – the accounting framework these estimates feed into.
• Animal welfare – the parallel assessment the same data supports.
• Greenhouse gas inventory – the reporting structure that requires farm level numbers.
• Merck Animal Health – the group that now owns the monitoring platform behind this filing.

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AU 2026202071 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.