Semiconductors and agriculture - a real problem for a virtual world

The news on Monday that JBS plants in Australia and the US were forced to shut off their kill chains due to a cyber attack highlights that agriculture and its supply chains are not immune from these battles.

As this news was breaking, another story was being published by the Financial Review about national security rules and Australia's reliance on foreign supplies of semiconductor chips (which are in everything from your tractor to flat screen TVs).

It contained a comment from global IT company, Cisco, said "Cisco's own cyber threat intelligence organisation, Talos, was blocking 20 billion threats a day and that the strength of cyber security was now the top priority for companies around the world ... ".

That's astonishing. Twenty billion a day handled by Cisco. It's just one company. So it's not really a surprise that a global company like JBS got hit.

And yet, cyber attacks are just one of the battlefronts at this new frontier.

Also read: No chips, no worries as road vehicle imports defy semi-conductor drought

A day earlier, SMH published an in-depth article about one of the world's largest semiconductor producers, a company called TSMC, Taiwan, also the producer of the world's most advanced chips and a supplier to both US and Chinese firms.

That region in Taiwan is also experiencing a one-in-50-year drought and water is a critical input for production.

"On Tuesday, if Taiwan has not received more than 100mm of rain in its reservoir catchment, some of the world's largest semi-conductor factories will have to scale back water consumption," the article stated.

And the weather websites that night for that region didn't look promising.

Meanwhile, the majority of our government and industry plans to improve efficiency in agriculture are based around technology, which increasingly relies on such technology.

Countries now discuss chip independence like it was food security. Hence why Taiwan's production is not only threatened by drought, but US-China tensions.

Taiwan isn't the only competitior in this space, but, these ever smaller chips are a narrowing bottleneck for economic advancement and global competitiveness, making them a critical component for an unsubsidised, export-oriented industry like Australian agriculture.

Agriculture's success is partly tied to this same race.

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