The Rabbit Hole: A “Black Swan” in the Breadbasket

Editor’s Note: In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporter Peter Beck looks at a newly-released academic report that’s raising alarms about the resilience of the country’s food supply and how law enforcement have been building a series of criminal cases to counter a ‘black swan’ event. -Seamus

This past summer, the Cyclospora outbreak caused a stir in the American food supply. Grocers pulled lettuce products from their produce aisles. Restaurants dropped menu items. And people on social media weighed the potential consequences of eating a salad. Meanwhile, a shaky health monitoring system struggled to get the crisis under wraps. By the time it was contained, more than 1,000 people were hospitalized, and two died from the outbreak. 

But what would happen if the next outbreak wasn’t an accident or an oversight, but instead a targeted attack? A new report by researchers at Georgetown University says the U.S. is woefully unprepared for an emerging biological threat: agroterrorism, or the possibility that some foreign state or terrorist organization will infiltrate the U.S.’s agricultural infrastructure with a pathogen or bacteria.

Security at American agricultural facilities, as the researchers Ella Busch and Jacob Ware write, is low-grade, disjointed, and vulnerable to infiltrators. Meanwhile, the advent of artificial intelligence and access to its unrestricted models may allow antagonistic nations and terrorists to create more effective biological weapons. And although such an attack has never happened, U.S. adversaries appear to have at least considered it.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a Chinese military strategy document stated, “The biological field has become a brand-new territory for the expansion of national security.” This came on the heels of years of Chinese hacker attempts to steal U.S. agricultural data, which continue to this day. In 2021, another group of researchers uncovered that hackers could access and control John Deere tractors from outside the U.S.

Other countries and terrorist organizations, including ones that the U.S. is directly engaged in hostilities with, have also openly alluded to adopting biological warfare. In December 2025, Iranian media reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was in the process of “developing biological and chemical warheads for the country’s long-range ballistic missiles.” A 2002 raid on an al-Qaeda safehouse in Afghanistan led U.S. forces to discover manuals about a possible agroterrorist attack in America.

“In the event of a successful agroterrorism attack,” the Georgetown researchers wrote, “public trust in the national food supply is expected to rapidly deteriorate as supermarkets, which tend to carry seven days’ worth of supplies, would quickly face shortages.” The report continued:

Biological weapons, given their abundance in nature, are also relatively accessible while inflicting severe physical and psychological ramifications upon civilian populations at a rapid scale. Whether directed at plant, animal, or civilian targets, biological agents present an accessible, low-cost, and plausibly deniable vector for states and terrorist groups alike to engage in irregular warfare.

While the nightmare scenario of all-out biological warfare is always possible, law enforcement has also been looking at low-level agro-based threats, which brings us to a lab at the University of Michigan.

It all began with a wad of tissues stuffed at the bottom of a backpack.