Oxford (Real) Farming Conference 2020
By: Aude Vuilli
Tags: Data Science, Agriculture, Towards Data Science, NLP, Data Journalism

Oxford (Real) Farming Conference 2020

Introduction

Last week, from the 7th to 9th of January, Oxford hosted the well-established, traditional and businessy Oxford Farming Conference (OFC) and its antidote Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC). Both aims to connect actors involved in the agricultural and food sector to tackle the challenges of today’s agriculture.

As I worked the last 3 months at WBCSD on the upcoming paper “Protein pathways: Accelerating sustainable food system transformation through business innovation”, which will be launched at World Economic Forum 2020 in Davos, I found necessary to look at the latest discussions in the field.

The OFC and the ORFC offered me a unique opportunity. These conferences comment on the many challenges that England, similarly the World is facing in agriculture: the need to answer food security, the duty to protect natural ecosystems, and the necessity to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions.

The aim of this article is to wrap-up the discussions that happened during the OFC and the ORFC and to gain an overview of the most prominent actors of the UK agri-food sector.

Images by FAO

Data and Methods

The data for this blog post was collected using the Twitter API. The OFC took place from 7th to 9th of January and the ORFC from 8th to 9th of January. I started to collect the tweets 5 days in advance (on the 2nd) and stopped one day after the conferences ended (on the 10th). In total, 3,671 tweets were recorded, using the hashtags #OFC20, #OFC2020, #ORFC20, #ORFC2020.

Once the tweets were collected, I used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, namely Sentiment Analysis, Word Embeddings, and Topic Modelling.

Tweets Analysis

The following graphs and tables illustrate the analysis undertaken to better understand the discussions from the Oxford (Real) Farming Conference.

The menu is the following:

Exploratory data analysis: Daily and hourly frequency of tweets, top 10 tweeters by the number of tweets, top 10 tweets by the number of likes, retweets and replies.

Daily and hourly frequency of tweets, top 10 tweeters by the number of tweets, top 10 tweets by the number of likes, retweets and replies. Sentiment analysis: Daily sentiment score, top 5 most positive tweets, top 5 most negative tweets

Daily sentiment score, top 5 most positive tweets, top 5 most negative tweets Semantic analysis: Top 10 words, top 10 hashtags, closest words for ‘farming’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘food’, topics in tweets

Exploratory Data Analysis

The line graphs below show the number of tweets per day and average tweets per hour, from one week before the OFC and ORFC 2020 started and one day after both conferences finished. The most active day was the 8th of January, the first day of the ORFC and the second day of the OFC, cumulating to almost 2k tweets. The hourly frequency of the tweets shows two peaks, the first in the morning, at 11 am and again in the afternoon at 3 pm. This highlight that conference’s attendees use Twitter to directly share and comment on the talks happening.

The left line graph shows the number of tweets by day before, during and after both conferences, the right line graph shows the average number of tweets by hour.

Looking at the ten most popular accounts that tweet with the hashtags #OFC20 and #OFC2020 or #ORFC20 and #ORFC2020 allow an understanding of the main actors of the event. The graph below shows the ten Twitter accounts with the highest number of tweets for the OFC and ORFC.

The left bar chart shows the top tweeters by the number of tweets for the Oxford Farming Conference, the right bar chart shows the top tweeters by the number of tweets for the Oxford Real Farming Conference. Timeline of the tweets is from the 2nd to the 10th of January 2020.

At the OFC the top positions are held mostly by thought-provocating speakers, in contrast to the ORFC, for which well-known charity and associations of farmers arrive at the front.

Some quick facts about some of the most active OFC and ORFC participants!

Sarah Bell is an influential speaker on the subject of digital leadership in agriculture, Rob Yorke is a famous commentator on farming topics and facilitate the discussion: “How to finance “Agroecological Farming”?, Prof. Fiona Smith is professor of International Trade and discussed on UK agrifood trade post-Brexit, Matt Naylor was director of the OFC from 2017 to 2020, and is the founder of “agrespect”, promoting and supporting diversity, inclusion and enablement in the countryside.

The Soil Association, Agricology, Sustainable Food Trust, Innovative Farmers, the Gaia foundation (Seed Sovereignty UK & Ireland), or Sustainable Soils engage with many farmers and campaign for sustainable food and farming systems. Dan Crossley, the non-debatable winner of the number of published tweets is the current director from the Food Ethics Council.

Image from by Soil association

The table below shows the ten most popular tweets in term of likes and retweet. Looking especially at those tweets gives an insight into the most popular conversations. Climate change, the nutritional value of industrial plant-burgers, UK agri-food trade, peatlands burning, racism, agroforestry, agroecology, and livestock for soil fertility are the main topics among the top tweets.

The table shows the then most popular tweets (by number of likes, number of retweets). Please follow this link to have an interactive visualization.

Also of interest is to look at the tweets with the most replies. Compared to the above, these tweets show what topics have engaged the main discussions and debates.

Looking more closely at the content, a good mix between serious questions, and funny comments can be found! Do you wonder what is the answer to “How to start a farming conference?!”? If yes, then have a look over here!

The table shows the then most popular tweets (by number of replies). Please follow this link to have an interactive visualization.

Sentiment Analysis

This technique is used to discover the underlying emotions (positive, neutral, negative) expressed in texts. Several tools have been developed for this task. Here, I employed the VADER library, which has been developed specifically to understand the sentiments expressed in social media. Parul Pandey article or the GitHub repository are great resources to better understand VADER.

The line graphs below show the average sentiment of the tweets for both the OFC and the ORFC, with +1 being very positive and -1 being very negative.

The left line graph shows the average sentiment per day of the tweets for the OFC, the right line graph shows the average sentiment per day of the tweets for the ORFC.

The day before the conferences started, the sentiments towards it showed to be relatively positive, but this declines slightly after the conferences started. While the OFC sentiment rises again at the end of the conference, the ORFC sentiment continues to decline.

Looks like OFC ends up letting a slightly more positive note than the ORFC!

If you wonder what were some of the most positive, negative tweets at both conferences, have a look at the table below!

The tables show five of the most positive and negative tweets for the OFC and ORFC 2020.

Semantic Analysis

To get a more granular understanding of the text from the tweets, I created Words embeddings using the Word2Vec model from the gensim library. This technique is handy to find out which are the words more closely related to each other. For the maths behind the Word2Vec model, have a look at the original research paper by Tomas Mikolov’s team. Or you may prefer the more simplified article by Kavita Ganesan or brilliant application by Vishal Kumar.

But first, let’s have a look at the frequency of the most popular words and hashtags in the tweets.

The left line graph shows the average sentiment per day of the tweets for the OFC, the right line graph shows the average sentiment per day of the tweets for the ORFC.

Interesting words are future, change, and strategy, pointing out to the need of the agricultural system to plan and adapt for tomorrow’s climate. Interesting hashtags are “agroecology”, “soilhealth”, and “agroforestry”, as well as “farmerled”, “ruralinclusion”, and “mentalhealth”. The first group stand for farming approaches that promote sustainable agriculture, such that natural resources are protected and food security is ensured. The second group identified key challenges that people in today’s farming system are facing: mental distress and exclusion.

Words Embeddings

The four scatter plots below show the more closely associated words with “livestock”, “soil”, “climate”, and “biodiversity” entities.

The four graphs show the closest words (nearest neighbours) associated with the keywords livestock, soil, climate and biodiversity.

Livestock

Interestingly “livestock” is closed to “help”, “reduce”, “impact”, and “sustainable”, which refer to the “important” “discussions” around the livestock “production” sector. More specifically, to the question: What are the possible sustainable measures to use to help the livestock sector reduce its emissions? It would not be surprising to find words such as feed quality, feed supplements, animal health, anaerobic digesters, or grazing management also close to “livestock”, as these entities illustrate mitigations options refer by agri-food experts.

“Tree” is also close to “livestock”, and point to the session at the ORFC discussing Silvopasture. This farming practice integrates trees and pasture into a single system for raising livestock and suggests benefits for climate change mitigation, animal welfare, and forage availability.

Soil

“Soil” shows to have some similar words than “livestock”. Important here is the word “carbon”, that may refer to soil carbon sequestration. The idea is that by “better” “land” management practices, can improve significantly the soil quality and the capacity of the soil to sequester organic carbon.

Climate

Looking at closely related entities for “climate”, “must”, “policy”, “everyone” and “work” are interesting to point out. Maybe you are thinking about Greta Thunberg words at the US Congress in September 2019 campaigning for action on climate change: “You must take action. You must do the impossible.”. Or about the “everyone” action, the collaborative “work” to combat climate change such as the need for “policy”, the need for business leadership, sustainable farmers and responsible consumers.

Biodiversity

Importantly, the words close to “biodiversity” are “agroecology”, “practice”, “organic” and “consumer”. This illustrates the needs for farming practices that contribute to the protection of natural habitats rather than to their damages, but also to the need for consumers to adopt a healthy, balanced and sustainable diets.

Images by FAO

Conclusion

Here you have it! Although I missed the conferences, the inspiring talks, and the people, I could get a glimpse into the debates! Of course, there is still an immense potential to dig into the tweets further, but this will not be for today.

You can find the interactive Dashboard visualisation here!

Thanks for reading!

Aude

Ps: I am interested in doing social network analysis! If you have come across any good articles or python tutorial, please let me know!

I am a Data and Plant Scientist at Vertical Future, previously at WBCSD. MSc. in Urban Analytics and Smart Cities from UCL The Bartlett CASA in London and BSc. in Food Science from ETH Zurich. Passionate about cities, food, and health get in touch via Twitter or LinkedIn.