Securitywindows-xpsmall-business-itbackupsfirewallsagriculturetech-support
A Yorkshire Farm Ran a Few Hundred Cattle on One Windows XP PC With No Backups, Patched by the Farmer's 14-Year-Old Grandson
A support tech told The Register's On Call column that a Yorkshire dairy farm ran feeding, milk yields, breeding and government reporting for a few hundred cattle on a single Windows XP PC, just after XP's mainstream support ended in 2009, with no backup, no spare and no firewall.
Jason, a pseudonym the column gives him, told The Register he’d helped an agricultural equipment dealer with computer problems for about 20 years. One day the dealer asked him to help at a farm in Yorkshire, “where he’d arranged the supply and installation of a fairly substantial system that used a computer to do effectively everything for a few hundred cattle.” That covered “individually feeding them, measuring milk yields, planning pregnancies, and periodically submitting all the data to the government.”
Other tech support people had already tried to fix it and failed. “Despite not being fond of wading around in cow shit at four in the morning, I agreed to take a look at the system,” Jason said. The farm produced many tons of milk a week, so he expected industrial-grade equipment. What he found was “the whole thing was controlled by proprietary software on a single PC running Windows XP – just after Microsoft ended mainstream support.” Microsoft’s lifecycle page for Windows XP puts that date at April 14, 2009, with extended support running to April 8, 2014, so this is a story from about 17 years ago, told now.
The farm had no backups, no spare PC and nobody on site to look after the one it had. When Jason asked who installed the security patches, he learned the farmer’s 14-year-old grandson “had done some computer studies at school, so he got the job.” The grandson had either missed or chosen to keep the “many rather racy videos” Jason found on the machine. “When the farmer’s wife learned of this, there was what can best be described as a hullabaloo,” he said.
Digging further, Jason found the PC was “sending milk production data to Her Majesty’s Government,” and that “neither the government, nor the farm management software vendor, had bothered to require installation of a firewall.” He installed one, made other tweaks and got the system working. “Everyone seemed pleased, or at least they did until they got my bill,” he wrote, adding that “they did pay it promptly.”
He never heard from the farm again. “I don’t know if that’s because it’s still working OK, or if they’re just too embarrassed to see me again, or they found someone cheaper who could cope with my recommendations,” he told On Call. The column is the only account of it, and it names neither the farm nor the software.
Setups like this one will keep turning up for years, with high confidence, because specialist farm, lab and factory software is often certified for one PC and one version of Windows, and owners replace it only when the hardware dies. With medium confidence, the next version of this story involves a newer Windows version past its support date, running a machine nobody dares to update.