America Has Spent Decades Protecting Critical Infrastructure. Perhaps We Should Remember That the Soil Beneath It Is Infrastructure Too.
By Joe Cozart
There is something almost reassuring about the phrase potato wart. It sounds agricultural, obscure and safely confined to the vocabulary of plant pathologists and farmers. It certainly does not sound like national security. No one is likely to convene the Situation Room because someone mentions a diseased potato. There are no satellite photographs of potato wart moving toward the border, no fighter aircraft scrambled to intercept it, no television graphics showing its trajectory across North America. Yet perhaps that instinctive dismissal tells us something about the way we have learned to think about security. We have become extraordinarily good at recognizing threats when they look like threats and considerably less comfortable recognizing them when they look like potatoes.
Potato wart is caused by Synchytrium endobioticum, a soilborne pathogen affecting cultivated potatoes. The United States Department of Agriculture describes it as a federal quarantine pest and a Select Agent. It is not currently known to occur in the United States. What makes the organism strategically interesting is not merely what it does to a potato but what it can do to the ground. Its resting spores can survive in soil for as long as forty years, and USDA says there is currently no treatment capable of controlling the disease once established. It can move through infected potatoes, contaminated soil, agricultural machinery, footwear and other pathways so ordinary that none would look particularly threatening while crossing a border.
That is where a plant disease begins to resemble an infrastructure problem.
The United States has traditionally understood infrastructure through the things civilization builds: electrical grids, bridges, ports, telecommunications networks, pipelines, water systems, military installations, transportation corridors and increasingly the digital architecture connecting nearly everything else. The federal critical-infrastructure framework formally recognizes sixteen sectors, including Food and Agriculture. The underlying definition is intentionally broad: critical infrastructure consists of the assets, systems and networks whose disruption could have serious consequences for national security, economic security, public health or public safety.
Yet there remains something revealing about the imagery the word infrastructure produces. We imagine concrete. Steel. Fiber-optic cable. Power lines. Runways. Server farms. We think about what has been constructed upon the landscape rather than the productive landscape itself.
Agriculture forces us to reconsider the distinction.
A runway damaged by an attack can be repaired. A destroyed transmission line can be replaced. A bridge can be reconstructed. Servers can be replicated, generators brought online, communications rerouted and damaged buildings rebuilt. None of those tasks is necessarily easy or inexpensive, but they exist within an engineering paradigm with which modern governments are comfortable: something was damaged; capital, material and labor can restore it.
Contaminated agricultural soil presents a different proposition.
If an organism establishes itself in productive land and remains viable there for decades, the infrastructure has not merely been damaged in the conventional sense. One of the underlying conditions upon which the productive system depends has changed. Money cannot necessarily restore it next year. A congressional appropriation cannot manufacture forty years of elapsed biological time. Heavy equipment cannot simply excavate an agricultural region and install another one.
The ground itself was the infrastructure.
This is not a novel concept to the government agencies responsible for protecting American agriculture. USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service maintains an explicit crop-biosecurity mission aimed at preventing the introduction, establishment and spread of invasive pests and diseases. The federal government likewise identifies Food and Agriculture as critical infrastructure, and USDA has increasingly described agricultural security in the vocabulary of national resilience, supply chains and biological threats. What is interesting is not that specialists understand this. They obviously do. What is interesting is how rarely the rest of the national-security conversation adopts the same conceptual frame.
The current situation involving Prince Edward Island illustrates the point elegantly.
Following another Canadian potato-wart infestation announced in May 2026, USDA strengthened the conditions governing certain potatoes entering the United States from Prince Edward Island. Beginning October 5, facilities receiving applicable bulk shipments face additional requirements involving traceability, certification, handling and disposal of potato waste. Cull potatoes and waste from those shipments cannot simply be diverted into animal feed, and imported PEI potatoes intended for consumption cannot be used as seed potatoes. The architecture is painstaking because the pathway is mundane. A dangerous biological event does not require a hostile aircraft crossing American airspace. It can begin with dirt clinging to a potato.
Canada is not the adversary in this story. That distinction matters. The United States and Canada possess one of the most integrated economic relationships in the world, and agricultural trade across the northern border is overwhelmingly an asset to both countries. The vulnerability exists precisely because productive systems are interconnected. Connectivity creates prosperity, efficiency and specialization. It also creates pathways.
We already understand this perfectly well in virtually every other security domain.
An interconnected electrical grid is efficient and vulnerable. A global communications network is extraordinarily productive and vulnerable. International aviation is useful because aircraft move rapidly between distant places, which is also why disease can move rapidly between distant places. Global maritime commerce permits astonishing economic specialization while creating dependencies at ports and shipping chokepoints. The same architecture that allows something beneficial to move efficiently can allow something harmful to move efficiently.
Agriculture is no exception.
The difference is that agricultural connectivity operates partly through biology. The cargo is not merely the commodity listed on the bill of lading. Soil can travel with it. Organisms can travel with the soil. Insects can move inside packaging. Pathogens can accompany plants, animals, seeds and food products. Machinery itself can become a transportation system for biological material. The border therefore becomes something much more complicated than a line separating sovereign jurisdictions. It becomes a membrane through which extraordinarily valuable commerce must continuously pass while biological risk is continuously filtered.
That is national-security architecture even if nobody wears a uniform while administering it.
The lesson extends well beyond potatoes. America’s agricultural abundance is sufficiently familiar that it is easy to treat it as a permanent condition rather than a strategic asset requiring protection. Food appears in grocery stores with such consistency that the enormously complex system behind it becomes invisible. Farms depend upon soil, water, genetics, fertilizer, fuel, equipment, transportation, labor, processing, refrigeration, communications, financing and international markets. Every one of those components creates dependencies, and many connect agriculture to other recognized critical-infrastructure sectors.
National resilience therefore cannot be measured simply by the number of commodities America produces during an ordinary year. It must also include the ability to preserve the biological foundations that allow those commodities to be produced year after year.
This becomes particularly interesting from the northern Plains.
North Dakota sits in a geography where agriculture, international commerce, transportation, energy and national defense occupy the same landscape. The Canadian border is not an abstraction here. Neither is agricultural production. Neither is national security. A person can drive across this region and encounter strategic military installations, internationally connected transportation corridors and some of the most productive agricultural land on Earth without ever leaving the same broad horizon.
Those systems are usually discussed separately because bureaucracies organize themselves separately. Agriculture belongs in one conversation. Defense belongs in another. Border security belongs somewhere else. Trade belongs to another committee, another agency, another conference and another group of specialists.
The landscape itself recognizes none of those distinctions.
That may be the more important lesson hidden inside the potato.
Modern governments naturally divide complicated systems into administrative categories because institutions require boundaries in order to function. Reality is under no obligation to respect them. Soil does not know which congressional committee has jurisdiction over it. A fungal spore does not recognize an international alliance. A pathogen does not care whether the vehicle carrying it has been categorized as agricultural commerce rather than national-security traffic.
The system remains one system whether government organizes it that way or not.
This is why agricultural biosecurity deserves to be understood not merely as agricultural regulation but as an element of national resilience. The argument does not require exaggerating every crop disease into a military threat. Quite the opposite. Strategic thinking becomes less useful when every vulnerability is described as an existential crisis. The more interesting proposition is simply that national security includes preserving the conditions necessary for a country to continue functioning, producing and feeding itself over long periods of time.
By that definition, productive soil belongs comfortably inside the conversation.
Perhaps the most useful way to think about potato wart, then, is not as a particularly frightening disease but as an unusually clear illustration of an overlooked category. The organism forces us to confront the difference between protecting what we have built and protecting what makes building possible.
America can construct another warehouse. It can manufacture another transformer. It can pave another runway and erect another communications tower. Those are formidable undertakings, but they remain undertakings.
Replacing an ecosystem is something else.
That difference should alter the way we think about infrastructure. The strategic inventory of the United States does not end with installations, factories, ports, grids and networks. It includes aquifers. Watersheds. Genetic resources. Agricultural ecosystems. And beneath an extraordinary portion of the country’s economic life lies something so ordinary that it becomes almost invisible.
Soil.
Perhaps that is why the potato wart story is worth remembering. It takes something almost laughably unthreatening—a potato—and reveals the architecture underneath it.
America has spent decades learning to protect the infrastructure sitting on top of the ground.
The next evolution in national-security thinking may begin by remembering that the ground itself is infrastructure.
——— GMJoe™ ———
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