Could super geomagnetic storms cause food crises?

The aurora that hit the internet last weekend was a "super geomagnetic storm" caused by the most severe solar storm in twenty years. This beautiful "Aurora Feast" also brought serious consequences.

Geomagnetic storms occur due to solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are bursts of electromagnetic radiation that can affect GPS, power grids and other communications systems. In just 9 days from May 3 to 11, the sun erupted with 11 X-class flares, the highest level. This was the first time in 20 years that such a high-intensity and high-density flare erupted.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announcement, this is the “most extreme magnetic storm since 2003” and “receipts have been received of grid instability, degraded high-frequency communications, and possible problems with GPS and satellite navigation.” preliminary report".

Some people have compared this geomagnetic storm with the super geomagnetic storm that triggered the Carrington event in 1859 (the aurora reached as far south as Central America and Hawaii). In that event, a large number of telegraph machines and electrical equipment in Europe and the United States were destroyed. This time, the power grid and satellite communications that are the most worrying appear to have withstood the test. SpaceX founder Musk posted a message on the social media platform Starlink also said that the geomagnetic storm (which was only brief) caused a "degradation in service quality" on the Internet.

What is unexpected is that this geomagnetic storm has caused catastrophic consequences, and the hardest hit area is modern agriculture.

Geomagnetic storm exposes vulnerability of modern agriculture

According to 404Media's investigation, this super geomagnetic storm, which has not been seen in twenty years, has brought a catastrophic blow to key GPS systems and precision agriculture operations in North America, causing agricultural production activities during the critical planting period to come to a standstill, and many farmers have suspended planting operations. .

Distributors of machinery giant John Deere have issued a message warning farmers that the accuracy of GPS systems used by some tractors has been "severely compromised", causing crops planted during solar storms (because they were planted crookedly) to be harvested. question.

As we all know, automation systems based on satellite communications have become a key link in modern agriculture (often referred to as "precision agriculture"). Farmers use highly automated tractors to plant crops in perfectly straight lines and even spacing. Precision agriculture has greatly increased farm yields, with a 2023 USDA report stating that more than 50% of corn, cotton, rice, sorghum, soybeans and winter wheat are planted and harvested using "autonomous navigation" technology. Many modern tractors can drive essentially autonomously, requiring supervision from a farmer in the cab. If planting or harvesting goes even slightly off track, tractors or harvesters can damage crops, or crops are planted crookedly and unevenly spaced, causing problems during the growing season and ultimately reducing yields.

"All the tractors are parked in the fields right now because the solar storm caused the GPS to fail," Kevin Kenney, a farmer from Nebraska, told the media: "There is no way to use GPS positioning, and we are in the middle of corn planting. It’s a critical period. I bet the commodity market will surge on Monday.”

Agricultural experts point out that GPS outages in the agricultural sector are a very serious problem, with a large number of agricultural machinery's GPS systems temporarily offline, causing intermittent connectivity and accuracy issues with the real-time kinematic (RTK) system connected to John Deere's "StarFire" receivers. StarFire receivers are installed on a large number of modern tractors and agricultural equipment. Its RTK system uses GPS signals plus a continuously updated "correction" data stream from fixed points on the ground to achieve centimeter-level positioning accuracy for crop planting and arable land. , spraying fertilizers and herbicides and other operations.

According to the latest news released by Landmark Implementation, a John Deere dealer in Kansas and Nebraska, the solar storm destroyed the accuracy of the RTK system of many farmers' John Deere tractors, and similar systems of other brands of tractors were also affected.

"Due to the way the RTK network works, the correction data sent by the base station is affected by geomagnetic storms, resulting in large deviations in the field and even some large heading changes," the dealer told farmers on Saturday morning. In a few months, when you return to the fields for fertilizing, spraying, tilling, harvesting, etc., we do not expect that the Agricultural Bank of China will be in the position indicated by the automatic path lines. This will affect the fields planted during the period of reduced accuracy. The automatic routing function will be very difficult or even unusable because the loss of accuracy is likely to be unpredictable."

An attack more terrifying than a geomagnetic storm

NOAA expects the solar storm to end on Monday. The impact of geomagnetic storms on agriculture has once again sounded the alarm for us. The vulnerability of modern agriculture and food security is far beyond our imagination. But the biggest threat comes not from the sun, but from hackers. Security experts warn: "Sunhackers" tell us tractors that rely on satellite and internet connections are a particularly worrying attack vector.

Last year, an outage in Inmarsat satellite service caused tractors in Australia and New Zealand to become stranded.

During the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, Ukrainian hackers remotely damaged Ukrainian tractors worth millions of dollars seized by the Russian army. Some observers are worried that malicious hackers may remotely update and monitor equipment of John Deere or other agricultural machinery manufacturers. Functionality transformed into attack vectors. Once applied at scale, such cyber attacks are likely to be used to disrupt critical agricultural infrastructure on a large scale.

In May 2022, the American agricultural machinery giant AGCO was attacked by ransomware and production operations were interrupted for many days. This caused its tractor sales to stagnate during the most important planting season in the United States.

In 2023, the Israeli farmland irrigation system was attacked by hackers. The water level controller responsible for farmland irrigation in the Jordan Valley and the control system of the Galil Sewage Corporation were destroyed, leaving farmers unable to water their fields.

These incidents have exposed the vulnerability of modern agriculture that has been ignored for a long time: cyber attacks targeting agricultural machinery or the satellites they rely on do not need to be "waited every twenty years" and can happen at any time, posing a far greater threat to the global food supply. A major threat from geomagnetic storms.