DARPA Initiates New Program to Defend Agriculture
On Tuesday, 2 June, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office unveiled a new initiative aimed at supporting US agricultural security. BTO Director Dr. Michael Koeris introduced the program in a short video:
“As we strive to uphold the DARPA mission to prevent strategic surprise, we are focusing our efforts to bolster our nation’s agricultural security. We believe that agricultural security is national security. We also believe that there exists a profound threat to agricultural security as biotechnological advances could be leveraged to disrupt food supplies and damage crops. That’s why we’re launching a new initiative—Ag BTO. Ag BTO is focused on developing new innovative solutions to defend our agricultural systems.”
DARPA laid out five areas of particular interest:
- Advances to early warning systems for chemical and biological threat surveillance, where desired attributes include: Geo-spatial resolution, temporal resolution, autonomous operation, and real-time readout.
- Rapid-response agricultural countermeasures to provide short-term defense against current and future threats, buffering against crop and livestock loss and threat expansion via protection and containment.
- Massively accelerated and expanded crop engineering for long-term threat defeat including both prophylactic protection and long-term sustainment approaches.
- Integrated and comprehensive prediction and modeling of threat pathogenicity and countermeasure effectiveness for our agricultural systems.
- Novel methods to assess the occurrence of human intervention and to attribute provenance, to support stakeholder decision making in the attribution triaging workflow.
In the initial stage of the program, DARPA will be accepting pitch submissions up until 31 August. Once these submissions are assessed, selected proposers will be invited to attend a workshop and pitch day held in Washington DC.
The agency hopes that the program will help encourage greater private-sector innovation in agricultural security, helping to protect America’s strategically critical crops and livestock. There is also a possibility that some proposals will receive DARPA funding and serve as a basis for further programs.
This latest initiative reflects the premium which both the Trump and Biden administration have placed on supply chain security. The official DARPA announcement is available here.