Temujin Scott, General Manager, Findura Insurance & Risk Solutions
September 2026
In February this year, one of Australia’s largest poultry producers had its systems taken offline by a cyber attack. Hazeldenes runs more than 50 sites across Victoria and processes around 900,000 birds a week. The attack forced a site-wide wi-fi shutdown, packaging and production halted, and within days pubs, butchers and retailers across the state were short of chicken.
Nothing was stolen and no machinery was damaged. The business simply could not operate.
That is the shape of cyber risk in agriculture, and it is why the risk can be underestimated. Farm insurance has traditionally been organised around things you can walk up to and inspect: the header, the shed, the herd, the fences, the crop in the ground. A cyber loss leaves the paddock looking exactly as it did the day before.
Ask most farm business owners what a cyber attack looks like and they might describe someone breaking into a computer. In practice the most common and most expensive loss is far more ordinary. It is a payment that lands in the wrong bank account.
Farming businesses move large sums on predictable cycles. Fertiliser and chemical orders ahead of a season, fuel accounts, machinery purchases, lease payments, commodity proceeds and payroll for a workforce that swells at harvest. Criminals do not need to get into the farm’s systems at all. They get into a supplier’s email, watch the conversation, wait for an invoice and then send a polite note advising that the bank details have changed.
Consider a mixed cropping and livestock operation ordering fertiliser ahead of winter sowing. The email arrives from the usual supplier contact and references the actual order. The finance officer does what good procedure requires and rings the supplier to verify the new account. The call is answered and the details are confirmed. The payment goes out.
What nobody could see was that the criminal had also placed a call-forwarding rule on the supplier’s phone line, so the verification call never reached the supplier. That scenario is drawn from a claim example in Sync Underwriting’s cyber risk report for the farming industry. The loss was $182,000, and the business had done everything its own procedures asked of it.
Analysis by Clyde & Co, cited in the same report, put the average funds transfer fraud loss at $135,000. In 78% of those incidents, none of the money came back.
Ransomware works on farms for a reason that has little to do with technology. A farm has windows that do not move. The crop is ready for about a week, and the stock are booked for a particular sale day. An attacker who encrypts a farm management system inside one of those windows is selling time back to the business at whatever price the calendar will bear.
The incident response firm CyberCX put it plainly in its 2025 threat report: attacking a farm during harvest is like attacking a hospital during surgery.
In February 2020, a ransomware attack hit Talman Software, used by more than 75% of the wool industry across Australia and New Zealand. Its Australian Data Exchange was shut down completely. Wool auctions were cancelled nationally for a week, an estimated 70,000 bales sat in limbo and an industry turning over $60 to $80 million a week stopped moving. Talman refused to pay the $8 million demand and rebuilt on new infrastructure.
Not one grower’s own system was breached. Growers wore the delay regardless.
Two years later a ransomware attack reached GrainCorp through Kronos, its third-party payroll provider, and some harvest casuals reportedly went unpaid for an extended period. The pattern in both cases is the same. The exposure sat in a platform the business relied on rather than one it owned.
One regulatory nuance to this is worth being aware of. Where both a platform provider and the farm business could report a data breach, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner takes the view that the party closest to the affected individual carries the notification obligation. If your payroll provider is breached, the people whose details were exposed are your employees and contractors, and the obligation lands with you.
Medium and large farms now run irrigation and water allocation on SCADA systems, automated feedlot and dairy platforms, GPS-guided machinery, grain handling automation, remote livestock monitoring and connected environmental controls. These were built for reliability rather than for security. They run continuously, often on software that cannot easily be patched, and they were historically isolated from any network until someone connected them so a pivot could be checked from the ute. The Australian Signals Directorate has warned that internet-connected operational technology in farming is being actively targeted.
A claim example in the Sync report describes a table grape and almond operation in Sunraysia whose irrigation scheduling was altered across 800 hectares. Over several days, over-irrigation waterlogged an almond block while under-irrigation during a heat event stressed the grapes ahead of harvest.
Systems can also fail without anyone attacking them. A vendor’s routine software update introduced a configuration error into the feed ration module at a Queensland feedlot running more than 8,000 head. Incorrect rations ran for three days before anyone identified the fault, causing measurable weight loss and a delayed sale consignment.
A farm package is built to respond to property, machinery, livestock and liability. It is generally not written to respond to money that leaves the business on a fraudulent instruction, to profit lost while systems are unavailable, to the cost of the forensic and legal specialists needed in the first 48 hours, or to the notification obligations that follow a privacy breach. Those exposures sit under a separate cyber policy, and the gap between the two is what farm businesses need to understand.
None of this calls for a technology project or specific IT expertise. It calls for the same conversation you would have about any other exposure that could stop the business in its tracks.
The Hazeldenes example didn’t involve losing a bird or a building. The business lost the ability to operate, for long enough that the shortage reached retailers across the state. That is worth reviewing as an exposure before the next season starts, while there is still time to do something about it.
Findura advises farming businesses across Australia and New Zealand on agribusiness and cyber cover. If you have farm insurance and your arrangements have not been looked at recently, we are happy to review them. Please contact us to discuss your insurance needs.
General advice warning: The information and any advice contained in this article are general in nature and do not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Before acting on this information, you should consider whether it is appropriate for your circumstances and review the relevant policy wording, Product Disclosure Statement and Target Market Determination, where applicable. You should seek professional advice before deciding whether to purchase or change insurance cover.