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3.3 Availability 
Threat to availability is simply put the disruption of agricultural food, production 
and supply. Threat to equipment availability can result from cyber related issues and 
natural disasters. Crop and livestock operations are reliant on this equipment. Any threat to 
equipment availability can be catastrophic. 
3.3.1 Timing of Equipment Availability 
It is to be noted that for every crop there is a window of time to plant and to harvest 
which implies also that all machinery for these operations must be in working conditions. 
Unavailability of machinery for the appropriate timing because of malicious hackers could 
be disastrous and detrimental. Equipment’s that are vulnerable to cyber-attacks can be 

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easily manipulated in their thousands at the same time, or even inappropriate patches can 
lock up machines that are supposed to be operational., resulting in downtimes. 
3.3.2 The Disruption to navigational., positioning and time systems 
The United states protected spectrum close to the global positioning system (GPS) is 
getting overcrowded and it is been released for 5G broadband signals, with the tendency for 
signal disruption. Farmers do face signal loss because of the overcrowding. This is not good 
for precision agriculture. 
3.3.3 Disruption to communication networks 
The agri-food industry is built on distributed sensory networks that are involved in 
data transfers of high volumes. Famers do rely on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi networks and cellular 
and USB drives to manually transfer data. It is to be noted that rural communications 
networks are major week points for precision agriculture and thus poor connectivity results. 
3.3.4 Foreign Supply Chain 
It is important to know that foreign manufactured equipment could be remotely 
disabled in large numbers through backdoor access from firmware, through malicious code 
that is sent to the equipment during planting or harvest seasons to cause damage.