UC Davis

Pastured poultry and its integration into crop production is a farming system that has the potential to improve agricultural systems by leveraging mutually beneficial relationships between poultry, soil quality, and crop or pasture production. Despite the potential advantages of this farming system, its scale and popularity are relatively small. Our study uses social media analytics to characterize online conversations and public perceptions around pastured poultry and integrated cropping, with the objective to identify the challenges and drivers of this farming system, and guide strategies for science communication and public engagement so that more farmers can potentially benefit from this type of farming system. We obtained data from 2,399 English language posts about pastured poultry and integrated cropping scraped from online platforms including blogs, news sites, Reddit, Twitter and others, published between February 2019 and May 2021. Our methodology utilized machine learning tools and manual content analysis to identify prevalent trends in online platforms that individuals and organizations use to exchange knowledge and opinions, and to understand their sentiments around various attributes regarding pastured poultry and integrated cropping. We found that social media users largely vocalized the potential benefits of pastured poultry and integrated cropping systems more so than the potential drawbacks, with contributions to soil fertility as the most mentioned attribute. We found low volume of conversations regarding food safety risks as well as a largely absent mention of scientific studies in pastured poultry and integrated crop production, indicating a possible gap in science news consumption and an opportunity for additional extension and outreach. While online news sites returned the highest volume of posts pertaining to pastured poultry and integrated cropping and generated a moderate impact score, they have the lowest reach score in terms of how many people on average may have seen the post relative to other content types such as forums, blogs, and Twitter. We identified several online forums including Reddit as hotspots of conversations around our research topic, which present an opportunity for targeted engagement of future agricultural extension efforts.