For many people involved in agriculture, particularly as children, the county or state fair is likely a place that holds special memories. There are notable differences across states with county and state fairs occurring at different points in Summer; however, the prominent aspects of 4-H and FFA participation — showing of livestock animals and an emphasis on commodity groups through fundraising and public education/awareness — remain reasonably consistent in concept, even if the delivery varies geographically.
The Minnesota State Fair is famous for its butter sculptures, which received media attention even in light of a canceled fair (A Canceled State Fair Can’t Stop Minnesota’s Famed Butter Sculpture Artistry). Fair foods often develop a following of extremely committed fans, yielding national media about whose fair food is better among fried candy bars, pulled pork sandwiches, hamburgers topped with other hamburgers, and fried <insert your favorite item here>. The Food Network even posts about the 50 best fair foods so that you can follow along with fair foods in faraway states. Yet, at their core, these fairs that combine carnival atmosphere, culinary cult followings, competition and youth education and development are, at the heart, agricultural fairs. They remain one of the last celebrated venues ubiquitous in their ability and intent to bring together agriculture — livestock agriculture, in particular — and the general public.
We recently teamed up with Dr. Julie Mahoney to study the U.S. public’s perceptions of agricultural fairs, a collaboration that resulted in the Open-Access (free to access and download) publication #GoingtotheFair: a social media listening analysis of agricultural fairs in Translational Animal Science, Volume 4, Issue 3, July 2020.
Similar to the methodology employed in a past Consumer Corner article on social media analytics and performance tracking, we used a prominent social media listening and analytics platform (Netbase) to quantify and analyze online media related to agricultural fairs during a 27-month period between July 1, 2017 and September 15, 2019. We began with a search for online media referencing agricultural fairs and then delved deeply into that dataset for references to fair food.
Online media mentions of agricultural fairs totaled 2,091,350. When 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). Volume of online chatter was seasonal, and Twitter was the most popular domain for fair-related search results. The positivity/negativity of the search results were analyzed using natural language processing capabilities — net sentiment is the total percent of positive posts minus negative posts, thus, is necessarily bounded between −100% and +100%.
Net sentiment overall was extremely positive, although mentions of zoonotic disease risk and other questions pertaining to animal agriculture did arise. Interestingly, politics at agricultural fairs was evident, as political candidates (more often in some states than others) use fairs as a means to address key stakeholders or interest groups. Details about key topics of discussion and changes in search results over time can be found in the full-length article, available here.
ConsumerCorner.2020.Letter.24
