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.
4 pages, Social media use in public health and other health related research applications has seen a rapid increase in recent years. However, there has been very limited utilization of this growing digital sector in agricultural injury research. Social media offers immense potential in gathering informal data, both text and images, converting them into knowledge, which can open up avenues for research, policy, and practice. There are a number of ways social media data can be utilized in agricultural injury research. This paper touches on the adoption of these data sources in health research and discusses the use of social media as an exploratory research tool that can peer into and identify the edges of potential health and safety problems.
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.
10 pages, Abstract— Smart agriculture involves the use of technology such as drones, GPS, robotics, IoT, AI, big data, and solar energy to improve farming practices. As with any disruptive innovation, however, stakeholder expectations can be misaligned from what the innovation can actually deliver. There can also be varying perspectives on what the innovation entails, related topics of interest, and impediments to large scale adoption. This study examines public perception of smart agriculture and its perceived drivers and challenges as present in social media discourse. We collected online posts from Twitter, Reddit, forums, online news and blogs between January 2010 and December 2018 for analysis. Results show that 38% of social media posts contained emotion with 52% joy, 21% anger and 12% sadness. Through topic analysis, we discovered seven key drivers and challenges for smart agriculture which included: enabling technologies, data ownership and privacy, accountability and trust, energy and infrastructure, investment, job security, and climate change.
15 pages, Trust is often an assumed outcome of participation in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as they directly connect producers with consumers. It is based on this potential for trust “between producers and consumers” that AFNs have emerged as a significant field of food studies analysis as it also suggests a capacity for AFNs to foster associated embedded qualities, like ‘morality’, ‘social justice’, ‘ecology’ and ‘equity’. These positive benefits of AFNs, however, cannot be taken for granted as trust is not necessarily an outcome of AFN participation. Using Chinese case studies of AFNs, which are characterised by a distinct form of trust pressure—consumers who are particularly cynical about small scale farmers, food safety and the organic credentials of producers—this paper highlights how the dynamics of trust are in constant flux between producers and consumers. I suggest that it is the careful construction of the aesthetic and multi-sensory qualities of food, which is often celebrated via social media, that human centred relations in Chinese AFNs are mediated. This leads to two key conclusions: first, that the key variable for establishing trust is satisfying the consumer’s desire for safe (i.e. "fresh") food; and second, the materiality of the food and the perception of foods materiality (especially through social media), must both be actively constructed by the farmer to fit the consumer’s ideal of freshness.
