Mississippi State University wins $850K award to build a food-security threat network

An interdisciplinary Mississippi State University team has won an $850,000 award from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to build AgSENT, a prototype system designed to flag early warnings of threats to the global food supply.

The award establishes the Agricultural Security Early Notification and Threat Network, an interface that integrates atmospheric, environmental, supply-chain, biological and societal data to highlight emerging agricultural security risks. The funding comes from DARPA’s Biological Technology Office, which is seeking tools to defend global food systems against both naturally occurring and manmade threats.

The project signals growing federal interest in treating the food and agriculture system as critical national-security infrastructure, on par with energy and supply-chain resilience — an angle with direct relevance for fertilizer producers whose feedstocks and trade routes are exposed to the same shocks.

The team is led by Narcisa Pricope, associate vice president for research and economic development, and includes political science associate professor Benjamin Tkach and computer science and engineering assistant professor Dimitrios Manias. Academic partners include Virginia Tech, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory also collaborating.

Pricope said the goal of AgSENT is to scan a wide range of threat indicators and translate that data into “actionable insights” that help decision-makers anticipate and mitigate risks to food security. She noted that threats range from atmospheric conditions that carry pathogens across regions to early signs of political instability in areas critical to supply chains.

The award builds on the university’s Food and Ag As National Security conference held in spring 2025, and will draw on MSU’s Applied Research Collaboratory, including its Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing and Biotechnology and its Center for Cyber Innovation. The team has not disclosed a public release timeline for the prototype interface.

Source: Mississippi State University