When I was a kid, you spent hours plowing a field. 

Back and forth. Back and forth. 

You lined the front tire of the tractor perfectly with the last furrow. The sun baked your neck. Dust clogged your nose. Your only companions were the birds and the deep rumble of the tractor. 

That was spring. 

Today? 

You sit in the cab with your feet up while a robot steers the tractor by GPS with sub-inch precision. It even sends data to the cloud so you can see how your corn is feeling in real time. 

It’s a farmer’s dream. 

It’s also a hacker’s dream. 

See, every time we automate something—every time we connect another system to the internet—we don’t just increase productivity. 

We increase attack surface. 

And guess what? The cybercriminals have noticed. 

Agriculture just had a 101% spike in cyberattacks. That’s not a typo. That’s triple digits. Farming is no longer about dirt under your nails—it’s about data in the cloud. And data, friends, can be stolen, held hostage, and weaponized. 

Hackers don’t care that you raise cows, not capital. 

They don’t care that your margins are tight, your team is small, and your systems were built in 2004 by a cousin who’s “pretty good with computers.” 

They care that you’ll pay to keep operations moving. 

They care that you’ll definitely pay to avoid losing your crop, your contracts, or your co-op reputation. 

Ahold Delhaize got hit. UNFI went dark. Those are the names that made the news. 

But what you’re not hearing about are the $5,000 wire frauds hitting family farms across the Midwest. Or the irrigation systems hijacked to run crypto miners. Or the phishing email that convinces your finance guy to wire next month’s fertilizer payment to some hacker’s account in Serbia. 

Because that doesn’t make the news. 

That just makes bankruptcy. 

Meanwhile, lawmakers are scrambling. They’re drafting bills, launching task forces, and throwing university grants at the problem like it’s 1999 and Y2K is back with a pitchfork. 

The USDA wants simulations. 

Iowa State is building cybersecurity outreach for farmers. 

Virginia Tech is studying how drones and combine harvesters get hacked. 

You know what all of this tells me? 

No one’s coming to save you. Not fast enough, anyway. 

This isn’t about “future threats.” This is happening now. 

So if you’re a CEO or CFO of a company that touches agriculture—whether you’re growing, producing, transporting, or even just cutting checks to someone who does—it’s time to face the dirty truth: 

You’re a target. 

And if you don’t have a plan in place, you’re going to wake up one morning to a locked-down network, a ransom note in your inbox, and a bank account that just funded someone else’s island vacation. 

So what can you do? 

Start by assuming it will happen. Because it will. 

Then put controls in place to limit the blast radius. 

  • Don’t wire money without confirmation. 
  • Don’t trust every “urgent” email. 
  • Don’t connect your million-dollar harvesting system to the internet without a password that isn’t “harvest123.” 

And above all—don’t wait. 

The robots have taken over the tractor. 

Now the bad guys are coming for the field. 

You can either become a statistic… or the one who saw it coming and steered clear. 

Start with plan. Need help building a plan? Start with our Cyber Liability Essentials.