The functioning of business structures in the agricultural sector has recently become significantly more complicated. In today's conditions, it is becoming more and more difficult to develop security strategies for agribusiness enterprises, because factors that have arisen relatively recently, especially of an external nature, have a significant negative impact on the financial activities of enterprises. In order to make optimal financial decisions, the entire toolkit, developed and tested by many years of business experience in the agricultural sector both abroad and in the middle of our country, should be used. One of these methods is economic descriptive cognitive modeling, which allows to analyze external and internal factors influencing the activities of enterprises, evaluate the strength of their interaction, and graphically display cause-and-effect relationships in a dynamic system. The method of cognitive modeling was studied in order to formalize the influence of exogenous and endogenous processes on the financial activity of agribusiness enterprises. As a result of the research, the components of the development of enterprises in the agricultural sector were analyzed from the standpoint of ensuring the efficiency of their financial activities using cognitive modeling. A matrix of causality and a cognitive map of the influence of a number of factors on the target component "financial activity of the agribusiness enterprises" were built. Impulse modeling of the influence of given concepts was carried out. The results of the conducted cognitive modeling of the influence of factors can be used to develop a safe strategy for the sustainable development of enterprises of other industries in the conditions of dynamic changes. The application of the cognitive approach made it possible to foresee various processes of development of situations in this system that may arise in it under the expected influence of various factors, as well as the influence of regulatory and control systems.