Cybersecurity for Smart Farming: Socio-Cultural Context Matters

Food security is a societal issue of increasing importance requiring careful consideration of the way we produce, process, and distribute food [2], [6]. Digital technologies are increasingly used to optimize processes to support these activities, and therefore, bear important implications for food security. In this article, we focus in particular on technologies used for an important aspect of such security - the effective production of sufficient food, or food availability. Technology has always been an integral part of humanity's efforts to optimize food production processes. Already thousands of years ago, farming tools such as plows were used, first by humans, then with animals, to improve conditions for planting crops and thereby increase yields. Modern food production has seen an explosion of both the amount and the sophistication of technologies used, and has increasingly moved to sophisticated digital technologies such as robots, sensor-driven systems, drones, and automated image analysis [11].