The technology that brings us self-driving tractors and other farming utilities has helped lift some of the burden for today’s farmer… But, as reporter Todd McDonald has learned, as with many technological advances, there are some drawbacks...
"...You know, there absolutely is cybersecurity when it comes to ag."
Nick Dusek is an assistant director with NDSU's High Performance Computing Division. He says all the new tech items for farmers are connected to the Internet in some fashion, and as a result, are potential targets for attack.
"The emerging area of cybersecurity concern is the Internet of Things, or IoT, so these wireless devices that are being deployed at the edge, meaning into fields. And these could be, you know, weather sensors, like temperature, pressure, humidity. They could be soil sensors, or, you know, another thing that's gotten a lot of attention are drones."
Dr. Greg Wettstein is principal engineer for the Division of Internet Technology at NDSU. He says we've entered a point in time where agriculture is almost completely dependent on embedded systems and implements.
"A great friend of mine from up in Minot just purchased a new sprayer. Spraying is the most critical thing that they do, given the cost of the chemicals and potential impact on yields. They make extensive use of GPS for positioning to determine where they're spraying, and in fact, he will tell you stories about that. They'll be sitting there at 7 o'clock in the morning, unable to take advantage of calm winds and cool temperatures because the electronics, for whatever reason in the sprayer, don't work, and therefore the sprayer doesn't move, let alone emit the chemicals in the proper ratios and orders."
Wettstein says the days of hacking into a system to do damage are dwindling. Instead, he says the focus of today's intrusions is more data-based, and part of what he calls the long game.
"Infiltrating combines to gain yield information, and obviously yield information is important because if you know potential yields, it puts you in a position to either play or manipulate commodity markets."
Wettstein says while a farm field in rural Burke County may seem benign, the data produced by that field is very valuable.
"...In the 70s and 80s, there was always the term GIGO, garbage in, garbage out, and that's exactly the case it is with artificial intelligence models. The models are only as good as the data that is used to either A, train the model, or B, for the model to react on after it's been trained.
So if you poison the data sources, you can potentially manipulate the intelligence models."
The Federal Department of Homeland Security works with the Department of Agriculture through the Information Sharing and Analysis Center. Agriculture cyberattacks are one area they closely monitor, and recent numbers show the number of reports in 2025 has nearly doubled for every month this year when compared to 2024.
Again, Nick Dusek.
"Nobody is immune to cyberattacks, but certainly if you're choosing equipment from reputable vendors that you have an established relationship with, and you have recourse to them if something goes wrong, then you're going to be in a better position than if you were just kind of buying whatever you can find online and putting it in your field."
Dusek and Wettstein say there are efforts underway at NDSU and elsewhere to create new methods of detecting and preventing cyberattacks, as well as bolstering cybersecurity.
For Prairie Public, I'm Todd McDonald.