Drivers and challenges of precision agriculture: a social media perspective
- PDF / 1,227,870 Bytes
- 26 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 69 Downloads / 318 Views
Drivers and challenges of precision agriculture: a social media perspective Martinson Ofori1 · Omar El‑Gayar1 Accepted: 26 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Precision agriculture, which has existed for over four decades, ensures efficient use of agricultural resources for increased productivity and sustainability with the use of technology. Due to the lingering perception that the adoption of precision agriculture has been slow, this study examines public thoughts on the practice of precision agriculture by employing social media analytics. A machine learning-based social media analytics tool—trained to identify and classify posts using lexicons, emoticons, and emojis—was used to capture sentiments and emotions of social media users towards precision agriculture. The study also validated the drivers and challenges of precision agriculture by comparing extant literature with social media data. By mining online data from January 2010 to December 2019, this research captured over 40,000 posts discussing a myriad of concerns related to the practice. An analysis of these posts uncovered joy as the most predominant emotion, also reflected the prevalence of positive sentiments. Robust regulatory and institutional policies that promote both national and international agenda for PA adoption, and the potential of agricultural technology adoption to result in net-positive job creation were identified as the most prevalent drivers. On the other hand, the cost and complexity of currently available technologies, as well as the need for proper data security and privacy were the most common challenges present in social media dialogue. Keywords Social media · Precision agriculture · Smart farming · Food sustainability · Sentiment analysis · Public perception
Introduction In recent times, Precision Agriculture (PA), a farming practice which has existed since the 1980s (Robert 2002), has become increasingly important due to food and sustainability needs, and the proliferation of smart farm technologies (SFTs) (Balafoutis et al. 2017; Kernecker et al. 2020; Wolfert et al. 2014). PA and its associated SFTs—made * Martinson Ofori [email protected] Omar El‑Gayar Omar.El‑[email protected] 1
College of Business and Information Systems, Dakota State University, Madison, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Precision Agriculture
up of data acquisition technologies, data analysis, and evaluation technologies, and precision agriculture technologies (Balafoutis et al. 2017)—could be key to meeting future food demands and ensuring sustainable agriculture (Clercq et al. 2018; Walter et al. 2017; Wolfert et al. 2014). In general, there is a consensus of this and other gains to be made from PA but a lingering perception on the slow adoption rate of PA still exists (Lowenberg-DeBoer and Erickson 2019), and certain instances have found the reality of farmer experience with SFTs to be different from their projected use by researchers and manufacturers (Lowenberg-DeBoer et al. 2
Data Loading...
