Who owns the sky above your salad?

Modern farms are data centres with livestock. GPS-guided tractors, soil sensors, autonomous sprayers, and remote silos are all networked — and increasingly, all connected via Starlink because nothing else reaches. We've quietly handed the digital spine of global food production to a single private foreign operator, and almost nobody has noticed.

Key Points

• The dependency is real and growing. Mid-to-large farms now run 15–80 IoT devices. Most lack enterprise IT support. Most use default credentials. Starlink works brilliantly — which is exactly why adoption outpaced any security consideration.
• Satellites are first-strike targets. The 2022 Viasat attack hit hours before Russia entered Ukraine, bricking 40,000 modems across Europe. Military comms dropped. Wind turbines went offline. Run that same playbook against planting season on a continent and you have a food crisis with no bombs required.
• One man's business decisions shouldn't determine a nation's harvest. SpaceX is a US defence contractor with a single influential owner who demonstrably intervened in Starlink's wartime provision. Australia, the EU, and most of the Global South have no domestic alternative at scale. That's not a strategy — that's a vulnerability.
• The attack surface is everything. Compromised firmware on Chinese-manufactured sensors. Unpatched farm management SaaS hit during planting season. A 57-year-old farmer clicking a phishing email. The threat isn't exotic — it's ordinary IT risk in an environment with zero IT culture.
• The slow attack is the scariest. No explosions needed. Just quietly corrupting agricultural data integrity — nudging yields, skewing commodity signals — until a nation can't quite grow enough food and doesn't know why.
• The Ask: Treat a satellite terminal on a farm as what it actually is — a geopolitical endpoint.