The Spy Who Came in from the Wheat Field

The twenty-first-century superpower no longer needs to park an aircraft-carrier group next to its rival; it just needs a lab bench or a laptop, preferably one with the moral firewall turned off. In an era where the biggest battlefield is the weekly grocery run, two vectors, killer fungi and killer firmware, have fused into a seamless doctrine of “dinner-table deterrence.” If you can make your enemy skip lunch, you can make their government skip town.

Back in 1958 the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps sketched something called Operation Steelyard. The plan was deliciously simple: load 500-pound “feather bombs” with powdered Puccinia graminis (wheat stem rust), drop them across the Soviet breadbasket for sixty days, and watch half the USSR’s winter wheat collapse in a red, pustular heap. The Air Force even pre-positioned the empty casings at RAF Lakenheath, just in case diplomacy ran out of patience faster than spores ran out of wind.

To grasp why rust in a wheat field can upstage nukes, a short horror tutorial: P. graminis is a basidiomycete fungus that reproduces via airborne urediniospores, essentially microscopic frisbees coated in Velcro. Once they land on a susceptible wheat stem, the spores germinate, punch through the epidermis with a hyphal battering ram, and hijack the plant’s plumbing. The crop spends the next three weeks looking healthy, then keels over into a tangled, shrivelled mess just when farmers are feeling optimistic. Yield losses reach 70 percent; combine-harvester operators reach for the hip-flask .

That Cold-War brainstorm never left the filing cabinet, but the fungus certainly did. Climate change has brewed warmer, wetter European summers, five-star hotels for rust, and complacent breeders retired most of the resistance genes because they hadn’t seen an outbreak since flared trousers were a thing. Today a single spore blowing in from North Africa could, in theory, shred Britain’s wheat varieties like soggy confetti; you could call it “levelling-up” if you were feeling party-political.

While the ghosts of Operation Steelyard rattle in the archives, its spiritual successors have switched continents and pathogens. In June 2025 two Chinese researchers, apparently moonlighting for the “Academy of Questionable Career Choices”, were charged in Detroit with smuggling Fusarium graminearum cultures, a wheat and maize blight whose Latin name roughly translates to “Congratulations, you now own a vomit factory.” The FBI labelled the fungus a potential agro-terror weapon; the defendants presumably labelled it “lab supplies, fragile” on the customs form .

Unlike stem rust, Fusarium carries chemical side-hustles called trichothecene mycotoxins, chiefly deoxynivalenol, a molecule that persuades human stomachs to reverse course faster than a politician reading exit polls. In livestock it goes for liver and reproductive organs, suggesting a pathogen with a taste for irony: it makes you both hungry and childless. From a strategic perspective, it’s the biological equivalent of ransomware with a “destroy backups” flag set to true, you don’t just lose the crop, you lose next year’s breeding stock too.

At this point you might be thinking, “Fine, lock the greenhouse, cancel the seed-swap club, and we’re safe.” Ah, no. Because somewhere between the lab bench and the loading dock sits a server rack blinking morse code for “Pay up.” The first modern demonstration of what could be called cyber-calories warfare arrived on 30 May 2021, when Brazil-based meat titan JBS discovered that its abattoirs had been encrypted into decorative paperweights. Five thousand miles of supply chain, feedlot, slaughterhouse, cold-store, burger-joint, froze behind an AES-256 paywall. Consumers learned two things: (1) beef can in fact become more expensive overnight, and (2) Bitcoin is now a line item in the global protein budget.

Ransomware, for the blissfully uninitiated, is a malicious application that crawls through a network faster than teenage gossip. It uses asymmetric cryptography: a unique symmetric key encrypts each file; that key is itself encrypted with the attacker’s public RSA key; the victim receives a cheerful note explaining how much cryptocurrency will buy the matching private key before the backups meet an unfortunate accident. Think of it as involuntary cybersecurity night school, except the tuition is seven figures and the final exam is whether you can still ship chicken nuggets.

By mid-2025, hackers had graduated from meat-packing to the more upscale pantry. United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI), the main logistics lifeline for Whole Foods, suffered a breach that throttled deliveries across North America; shelves briefly looked like a minimalist art exhibit titled “Still Life with Empty Kale Bin.” Critics of Amazon’s “just-in-time” inventory model were vindicated in real time as the absence of a YAML config file rippled into the absence of, well, dinner .

Europe, eager not to be left out, replayed an earlier episode: when the Kaseya supply-chain attack hit Sweden’s Coop supermarkets in 2021, 800 stores closed their doors and their fridges sang the unchilled blues. The United Kingdom’s 2025 highlight reel includes Marks & Spencer hemorrhaging £300 million in profit after the DragonForce crew turned click-and-collect into click-and-regret. Industry analysts now track food cyber incidents the way meteorologists track hurricanes: frequency up, severity up, insurance premiums crying in the bathroom. Halcyon Labs counted 84 attacks on agro-food companies in Q1 2025 alone, double the previous year, suggesting the criminals have discovered a new fad diet: every-one-else’s .

Academia, that polite spectator sport, has noticed the trend. A Journal of Crime, Law & Social Change paper dryly observes that a single compromised node in the food chain creates “amplifying effects” capable of bulldozing production, processing, and distribution faster than you can say Ctrl-Alt-Del. Translation: if one password is “password123,” the nation’s lasagna is on a respirator.

Put the two attack vectors side by side and an unflattering symmetry appears. Wheat rust germinates quietly, spreads silently, and emerges only when the damage is irreversible; ransomware does exactly the same, except the spores are packets traversing TCP port 445. The agronomists call it a latent period; the penetration-testers call it dwell time. Either way, by the time you notice something is wrong, you’re counting losses, not prevention opportunities.

Both weapons love modern efficiencies. Monoculture fields offer pathogens an all-you-can-eat buffet with zero genetic diversity to spoil the party; “single-vendor ERP” offers hackers a monoculture of software, equally tasty. Just-in-time logistics trims warehouse fat for shareholders; it also trims response time for crisis managers. A petri dish or a penetration test will confirm the same law: resilience is expensive, therefore optional, therefore missing.

There is also the small matter of attribution. A rust spore doesn’t carry a return address; neither does an IP packet bouncing off five botnets and two polite Balkan VPNs. Policy-makers talk earnestly about “deterrence”, the idea that you can scare an adversary into good behaviour, but deterrence works poorly when the crime is indistinguishable from bad luck or bad code. Is that brown lesion on the wheat leaf climate-change, sloppy farm hygiene, or the opening salvo of Steelyard 2.0? Is the frozen checkout terminal an underpaid sysadmin’s typo or a nation-state dead-hand poking your dinner plate? Please hold while we reboot geopolitics.

Technically, defending against the fungal apocalypse involves rotating crops, stacking resistance genes, and maybe resurrecting a few heirloom varieties that pre-date disco. Defending against the digital apocalypse involves zero-trust architecture, segmented networks, immutable backups, and hiring someone who can spell “multifactor.” Politically, both defences involve convincing the finance department that bad things exist before the quarterly report proves it with a smoking crater.

The good news, or comedic relief, if you’re feeling goth, is that solutions often overlap. A diversified seed portfolio looks suspiciously like a diversified server fleet; redundancy is sexy whether it’s steel silos or off-site backup tapes. Bio-surveillance networks that monitor spore loads can share bandwidth with intrusion-detection systems; the data pattern for “Houston, we have a problem” is the same jagged spike, whether it’s in ergosterol counts or failed login attempts.

Yet the underlying attraction of both attack classes remains brutal economics. A tonne of wheat fetches about $280 on the futures market; a vial of Fusarium costs less than a latte. A single ransomware kit on a dark-web marketplace rents for maybe $10,000; the JBS payout was reportedly eleven million dollars. The return on investment makes venture capitalists look like philanthropic monks.

So where does that leave the humble civilian attempting to procure a sandwich without triggering an international incident? Start by regarding food as critical infrastructure, not an Instagram backdrop. The next time your local MP waxes lyrical about hypersonic missiles, ask how many rust-spore monitoring stations exist in your constituency. When your supermarket app offers to save your login for convenience, consider whether convenience tastes as good as lunch. Maybe keep a few days’ worth of non-perishables, preferably ones that don’t double as ransomware bait, dry beans are notoriously incompatible with AES encryption.

Will these gestures stop a determined attacker? Probably not. But they might buy enough time for governments, growers, and sysadmins to remember that “resilience” is not a line item you negotiate down during budget season. In 2025 the distinction between a Category-5 pathogen and a Category-5 cyber-worm is largely rhetorical; both can have your meal plan for breakfast.

History gives us a sardonic epilogue. Operation Steelyard never flew, perhaps because saner heads prevailed, perhaps because the plume-dispersion math looked ugly. Today, however, you don’t need a B-29, just a courier with a cooled suitcase or a teenager with a phishing kit. The bomber is optional; the blast radius is the same. And unlike real bombs, these weapons don’t even violate arms-control treaties, try proposing the Geneva Convention on Bad Code and watch the room burst out laughing.

So pour yourself a glass of something shelf-stable, toast the delicate supply chains that keep it flowing, and remember: in the age of spore clouds and encrypted servers, civilisation hangs on a thread of gluten and gigabytes. Sleep tight, and may your backups, and your barley fields, be ever offline.

References:

Campbell, C.L. and Madden, L.V., 1990. Introduction to Plant Disease Epidemiology. New York: Wiley-Interscience.

CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), 2021. Ransomware attack on JBS Foods USA. [online] Available at: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa22-040a [Accessed 8 Jul. 2025].

ABCNews, 2025. Chinese nationals charged with agricultural espionage. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2-chinese-nationals-charged-smuggling-potential-agroterrorism-fungus/story?id=122454213 [Accessed 8 Jul. 2025].

Halcyon Threat Research, 2025. Ransomware Attacks Targeting Agriculture and Food Production Doubled in 2025 [online]. Available at: https://www.halcyon.ai/blog/ransomware-attacks-targeting-agriculture-and-food-production-doubled-in-2025 [Accessed 9 Jul. 2025].

Whittaker, Z., 2021. Kaseya hack floods hundreds of companies with ransomware. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/05/kaseya-hack-flood-ransomware/#:~:text=On%20Friday%2C%20a%20flood%20of%20ransomware%20hit%20hundreds,disruption%20and%20forcing%20hundreds%20of%20businesses%20to%20close. [Accessed 9 Jul. 2025].

Lang, T. and Heasman, M., 2015. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Reuters, 2025. British food and clothing group M&S discloses cyber incident [online] Available at: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/british-retailer-ms-discloses-cyber-incident-2025-04-22/ [Accessed 8 Jul. 2025].

Vicens, A.,J., 2025. Whole Foods supplier United Natural Foods says cyber incident disrupted operations. Reuters, [online] 9 June. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/unfi-hack-whole-foods [Accessed 8 Jul. 2025].

Wheelis, Mark, et al. Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945, Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 217-18, ISBN 0674016998.