Data was gathered from 2000 tweets by 1032 unique posters as of December 8th, 2018 at 4:14pm. This is what was used to create the infographic and to give a basis for the analysis throughout the rest of the project. It has to be acknowledged that data of this genre is constantly being updated with more and more user-generated content, but the general scope of the study can be assumed to be representative of a few trends.
The data collected included keywords, unique users (who may have varying degrees of engagement) and categories of subject matter based on the aforementioned keywords.
The main trends observed are as follows:
Larger organizations have more consistent engagement and organic reach. They dominate the popular agriculture-related hashtags (#ontag, #harvest18 - or presumably any harvest year, #cdnag), seem to be the reigning authority as they retweet farmer and agri-business accounts, and serve as a news source for farming science and updates. They also have the time and resources (a communications team, presumably) to produce original content that appeals to users for retweeting.
Keywords are mainly positive or neutral. While there are words like 'Canadian' and 'field' come up in a lot of tweets, so do 'great,' 'happy,' and 'dedicated.'
Engagement within these hashtags and with these keywords declines in what appears to be the off-season. When the farmers aren't producing/harvesting crops, they're less likely to engage online about those topics. They have less original content such as images and videos of crops and/or machinery. They don't rely on consistent updates about crop science, disease and weather conditions.