$900K Public Safety Canada Grant for Cybersecurity in Digital Livestock Farming Awarded to Suresh Neethirajan

Suresh Neethirajan received $900,000 from Public Safety Canada’s Cyber Security Cooperation Program to develop secure, tamper-evident digital architectures for connected agricultural technologies and cybersecurity micro-credentials for the agri-food workforce.

As Canadian farms increasingly rely on robotic milking systems, IoT sensors, automated ventilation, feeding systems, environmental controllers, and cloud-connected livestock monitoring tools, agriculture is becoming part of Canada’s critical digital infrastructure. This project, based in Dalhousie’s MooAnalytica group, focuses on strengthening cybersecurity for digital livestock farming. The work will develop secure-by-design architectures for connected agricultural technologies, including tamper-evident systems that can verify whether farm data has been altered and anomaly-detection methods for connected devices such as feeding systems, ventilation controllers, and environmental sensors. The project will be tested in real agricultural environments at Dalhousie’s Ruminant Animal Centre and Atlantic Poultry Research Centre rather than only in laboratory simulations. A workforce-development component will create micro-credentials to help producers, students, and technology developers understand cyber risks in modern agricultural systems. The project frames food production as critical national infrastructure, where protecting barns, sensors, and algorithms may become as important as protecting banks or hospitals.

• https://www.dal.ca/news/2026/03/30/agriculture-technology-artificial-intelligence.html