Farm Forecast: Cloudy With a Chance of Hacking

Precision Agriculture Boost Yields but Opens Farmers to Cybersecurity Risk Greg Sirico • December 18, 2025

It's tempting to think of agriculture as the last bastion of an analog world: tractors, animals, rolling fields. But most U.S. farmers are the cutting edge of Internet of Things adoption in a strategy that knits together remote sensors, location data, drone imagery and autonomous machines.

See Also: The Cost of OT Cybersecurity Incidents and How to Reduce Risk

The strategy is known as "precision agriculture." Backers say that without it, agriculture won't make the 70% productivity gain it needs to feed the nearly 10 billion people projected by the United Nations to live on Earth by 2050.

With connectivity comes risk, and precision agriculture has triggered a growing number of cyberthreats and incidents resulting in disruptions in food processing, distribution, livestock transportation and crop availability, driving millions ...