Cybersecurity threats to agriculture are real – but there are practical things producers can do to make farm businesses more secure.

Jan 12, 2024

Over the last year, big players in food processing and retail have been hit by cybersecurity incidents. If cyber criminals can target our largest companies, they can target individual producers. It turns out, this has already happened. In the first half of 2023, the Canada Cyber Foundry at the University of Guelph responded to over twenty calls for assistance. This year, news media reported that the climate control system of a chicken barn was targeted using compromised user credentials and, in a possible first, a cashless extortion attempt was made against a hog producer by an activist using ransomware.

Busier personal times of the year, like the holidays, family gatherings and get-aways that happen in December and January are opportunities for ‘the bad guys’ to take advantage of farm business owners who are trying to get things done for the end of the calendar year, take some well-deserved time off, and who might be distracted by having a busy calendar of events. These stories are worrying, but there are things producers can do, to start to make their operations more secure.

An important approach in cybersecurity is to create layers of protection that make it hard for attackers to penetrate a network and cause harm. The more barriers, the more effort is required to get through. Even if one layer is compromised, the others may prevent an attack from reaching its intended target (like a control system or farm data). These steps include: implementing a set of basic best practices for making your farm businesses more cyber secure; having a set of questions you can ask equipment vendors and data service providers, to understand what they are doing to protect you (don’t forget to ask for advice on how best to configure your digital equipment); and creating a farm business cybersecurity policy.

The Cyber Security in Canadian Agriculture project created a number of tools for producers who want take some of these important next steps. You can use the following QR codes to access some of these resources. More to come, over the next few months. In the meantime, have a cybersafe and happy holiday season!

Source : OFA

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.