MSU Awarded $850K From Darpa to Advance Global Ag Security, Early Threat Detection

Mar 06, 2026

An interdisciplinary team of Mississippi State University researchers has been awarded $850,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to enhance early detection of threats to agricultural security on a global scale.

The award funding will help establish AgSENT, or the Agricultural Security Early Notification and Threat Network. AgSENT is a prototype interface that integrates key atmospheric, environmental, supply chain, biological and societal data to highlight early warnings of potential agricultural security issues.

The funding was awarded by DARPA’s Biological Technology Office as part of its efforts to defend against naturally occurring and manmade threats to the global food systems that the world relies on. The MSU team is led by Associate Vice President for Research and Economic Development Narcisa Pricope and includes Political Science and Public Administration Associate Professor Benjamin Tkach and Computer Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Dimitrios Manias.

In addition to MSU, academic partners on the project include Virginia Tech, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory also is a collaborator.

Source : msstate.edu

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators