Case Western Reserve University researcher will use USDA grant to build more secure AI programs to help small farmers
‘No farmer should have to choose between modernizing their farm and compromising their privacy’
CLEVELAND—America’s farms are increasingly becoming high-tech hubs, as farmers rely less on The Old Farmer’s Almanac and more on emerging digital tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to yield healthier and more abundant harvests of corn, soybeans and cattle.
But farmers of small- to mid-sizedoperations—which make up more than 90% of all farms in the U.S.—have been hesitant to adopt the technology out of concern the data it collects could be misused by companies to charge them more money or undercut their crop prices.
Now, a Case Western Reserve University researcher will use a nearly $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to build a more secure AI framework tailored for farmers to protect their data.
Erman Ayday, associate professor in the Department of Computer and Data Sciences at the Case School of Engineering, is the principal investigator on the four-year grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
“Digital agriculture is the future of sustainable food production, but if the technology only benefits the largest players, we risk severely damaging the diversity of our agricultural ecosystem,” Ayday said. “No farmer should have to choose between modernizing their farm and compromising their privacy.”
Digital agriculture refers to the use of a range of technologies to help grow food, from sensors that measure rainfall, soil pH and nutrient level, to AI models that predict weather patterns and suggest how much water and pesticides for farmers to use on crops. Farmers also use the technology to shop for prices of everything from seeds and grain to major farm equipment.
A global survey released in September showed that 23% of North American farmers reported using AI to help inform their day-to-day operations.
Ayday, whose expertise is cybersecurity, was working on research funded by the National Science Foundation for the AI Institute for Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure with Computational Learning in the Environment, or ICICLE, project when he discovered a critical gap. Most of the research into digital agriculture focused on crop yield, and completely overlooked the need to protect the data that the digital programs collect from the farms that use them.
That may not have been a problem for large, corporate farms that could afford their own data security measures. But smaller, family farmers worried that their proprietary farm data—like what type of equipment they used, how much they paid for it, how often they water their crops, what types of fertilizer and pesticides they use and when they buy them—could be misused for price discrimination, inflated insurance rates, or competitive disadvantage.
“We recognized that the agricultural sector completely lacked the kind of robust, federated data protection frameworks we see in healthcare or finance,” Ayday said.
Ayday, along with co-investigator Alfonso Morales, the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leader in the study of food systems, will consult directly with farmers and lead a team that creates a new digital sandbox—an isolated, closed-off computer network that houses data.
The program will take the data collected from each farm and use advanced privacy techniques, like differential privacy and dimensionality reduction, to obscure sensitive details. This creates a secure environment, known as a sandbox, where AI models can still study the data to learn better farming practices while concealing the farmers’ identities and proprietary secrets.
Case Western Reserve’s commitment to interdisciplinary innovation positions it to be a leader in this field, as Ayday’s team will combine computer science, data ethics and practical engineering to solve a real-world problem.
The university’s physical position is also an advantage, Ayday said. The USDA ranked Ohio 11th among all 50 states by agricultural value in 2025.
“We are a premier research university surrounded by a massive, diverse agricultural sector,” Ayday said. “This allows us to rapidly bridge the gap between high-level laboratory research and practical, on-the-ground deployment with regional agricultural partners.”
