13 pages, Agricultural fairs provide one of the last frontiers, and largest stages, for showcasing livestock agriculture to the public. However, public funding, attendance revenue, animal biosecurity, and public health concerns are all aspects worthy of conversation and increased research attention given the interaction between livestock animals and the general public in fair and festival settings. A prominent social media listening and data analytics platform was used to quantify online and social media chatter concerning agricultural fairs during a 27-mo period. A general search for online media referencing agricultural fair keywords was designed; social and online media mentions of agricultural fairs (n = 2,091,350 mentions) were further queried according to their reference to livestock, fair food, or the major agricultural product producing species of dairy and beef cattle (n = 68,900), poultry (n = 39,600), and swine (n = 31,250). Numbers of search results were found to be seasonal and Twitter was the single largest domain for all fair-related results; in contrast, the majority of livestock-related media was generated by news sources rather than from Twitter. On a weekly basis, the percentage of fair livestock mentions with species-specific reference was highly variable ranging from 0% to 86.8% for cattle, 0% to 85.7% for poultry, and 0% to 76.9% for swine. In addition to quantifying total search hits or mentions, the positivity/negativity of the search results was analyzed using natural language processing capabilities. The net sentiment quantified is the total percentage of positive posts minus the percentage of negative posts, which results in a necessarily bounded net sentiment between −100% and +100%. Overall net sentiment associated with mentions of agricultural fairs was positive; the topics garnering the highest positive sentiments were fair food and cattle (both 98% positive). Online discussion pertaining to agricultural fairs and swine was overall positive despite references to swine flu outbreaks. In conclusion, livestock and animal products had positive net sentiment over the time period studied, but there are multiple aspects of agricultural fairs worthy of further investigation and continued vigilance, including zoonotic disease risk and public perceptions of livestock industries.
16 pages, Food policy increasingly attempts to accommodate a wider and more diverse range of stakeholder interests. However, the emerging influence of different communities and networks of actors with localized concerns and interests around how food should be produced and traded, can challenge attempts to achieving more open, sustainable and globally-integrated food chains. This article analyses how cultural factors internal to a developed country can disrupt the export of food to a developing country. A framing analysis is applied to examine how activists using social media to interact with the traditional news media in Australia were able to inflame public opinion and provoke outrage to disrupt the policy agenda. The paper contains a case study analysis of the media controversy in 2011 around the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesian abattoirs and the subsequent banning of live cattle exports to Indonesia by Australia. The analysis draws on the theory of binary cultural oppositions to examine how practices in relation to the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesia were reframed, through extensive media coverage of moral outrage into a critique of the values and cultural practices of Indonesian society.
