Hack the Root: Prologue

HOWDY!

As spring ends and summer kicks off, I am finally able to get to writing a small series on precision technology set ups for small gardens investigating success and failure throughout and what pieces of tech are useful to useless as well investigate the vulnerability that may arise when connecting random amazon cheap tech into the garden. More on I will be pulling from the McReynolds families 50 years of farming and gardening stories to share the tips in tricks of success and strange failures we have learned from Appalachia, Virgina ,& Texas growing in a campfire story style.

One of the McReynolds Garden Plots courtesy of my green thumbed uncle

I am looking for something that gives me energy. This is what I get excited to investigate and write on. finding the small ways the implements and tools we use to make our everyday gardens more efficient and bountiful

Before I dive deep into this series. I wanted to take a moment and say I plan to try to write my own material entirely in a more stream of conscious conversation. I am a ennginer who has never excelled at grammar but with AI starting to take the voice out of most writing and homogenize it( I promise to use spell check from here but wanted to make a point how terrible my grammar can be). I have decided to take a page out of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1841 essay Self-Reliance “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius”. It may make reading these a bit hard at times but hopefully you the reader will take time to give feedback and question my content as we strive to help bring awareness to a oft forgotten area of security. SO trust your own judgement and let's avoid conformity.

It has taken me a full year to find the best form for my desired communications having been given the opportunity to participate in a couple podcasts , shout outs to Cybermettle ,Brash Ag, and my soon to come episode on Bytes & Bites, and share my story has been more invaluable as we all strive to build a community in this critical infrastructure area, we call food & ag.

Who this is for?

Well it's for anyone who enjoys food , tech enthusiast tired of not seeing the sun, whether you have been farming large plots keeping a small beehive or just starting to look at how to start your first garden. Maybe you wish to try hydroponics, or even a single tomato plant. I started my first foray into small plot gardening because I wanted as many fresh herbs and spices at my back door. It could be I snagged one of you talented cyber professionals to wonder hey what exactly are my neat temperature sensors doing in the back yard? ,"how is my autonomous mower doing today as it mows over my dog's toy". This is for you to come and take a second to read the ramblings of you friendly neighborhood Cyber AG evangelist

Who Am I?

Well, if you made it this far yay! Howdy again I am just a Parent but also Data Wrangling Infosec ag engineer. I hope you find what I gather here as interesting useful and informative. I began my career at Texas A&M in the Biological & Agricultural Engineering Department. I thought I would never sit behind a desk and always be out in fields getting dirty and hands on... What ended up happening is I struggled as a PhD candidate and flunked out with a wonderful amount of student debt. Then the DOD came calling with an opportunity of applying my biological modeling and predictive analytics with a student loan repayment plan. The USMC Operations Analysis Directorate (OAD) took a chance on this weird agricultural engineer and brought me on. I got to travel the world and really apply operational/expeditionary data skills in so many ways and one way was finding out the information security or cyber security teams always seem to have mountains of data and no time to do anything with it. In my fashion I began to wrangle with this data and grind out new ways of finding anomalies (which is my current day job supporting as a consultant now). Along those lines around 2023 I started asking questions thinking back and wanting to reconnect with my formal discipline. During that time, I remembered I had a Professor Dr.Alex Thomasson who asked of us when working with or data "how would google farm?" I postulated a new question on this thinking hey "how would google secure farming?" google being the example of our time in the world of "Big Data". It was the gold standard of places to work.. i.e. 2013. SO I put together a small white paper and asked him hey what community of people is working in this space I would really want to connect!...

the answer is their isn't one in the field of autonomous/precision agriculture... but/however the pockets of goodness I have found are starting to connect! the Mississippi State University Autonomous Agricultural Institute ( AAI)/ Kristin Kings Anzen OT/Cybersecurity Association of the food industry/ Society of Precision Agriculture Australia (SPAA) is asking these questions as well... food an AG ISAC and many more but no community in the agricultural engineering space has taken the mantel yet. therefore, this little corner will begin growing from the hobbisest side and see what community we can build and connect to over time! Enough about my story let's go hack the root!

First up Hack The Root: 1.Robo Mowers will they eat my dogs toy...? release TBD

Lastly I will try to balance precision tech hack/ garden hack/ campfire garden story in a rotation of three...

Cheers,

Your Friendly Cyber AG Evangelist