Regenerative Farmers - What's the Craic?

We are delighted to show you this. Whilst developing our technical capability for providing answers, we have been listening to those who have questions. Tom Pycraft, Founder of Ark. Summit was interested to know about the engagement of the general British farming community with regenerative agriculture. But without specific sub questions.

This was a fantastic opportunity to showcase our approach. There are, of course other ways of answering this question through surveys and other research techniques. Well designed and sufficiently powered surveys are useful, but suffer from the fundamental characteristic of being based on questions that can tend to skew answers - prompted language. It is also ideal to know precisely what questions you need to ask. Our approach is to let the voices speak for themselves unprompted - from natural, emergent conversation.

The Farming Forum is the primary market square for UK farmers. This authentic dataset provided the raw narrative for our analysis. The following 2 page report is the result. The first step was to draw out the conversations specifically relating to regenerative practices - even in threads with seemingly unrelated headings. This step required the skilled application of data analytics, combined with a knowledge of regenerative farming techniques and topics.

Imagine a busy pub with lots of chatter, banter and conversation. In Gaeilic communities it is common to hear the phrase "What's the Craic?". An equivalent term would be "What's the goss?" or "What's occurin?" We use advanced topic modelling techniques to draw out these themes, and sub topics to build a hierarchical data structure. Again to emphasise - these topics emerge from the conversation.

Similarly, we can imagine the busy pub and asking "What's the vibe?" - looking for the positive and negative emotions evident in the conversations. Valuable insight for innovation, policy and change management.

Taken together, this Craic and Vibe approach allows us to navigate large data sets, to make comparrisons between groups, track the Craic and Vibe over time and associate with metadata to build valuable insight into how populations think, feel and behave. This is just the start and we are ready now to engage with food sector stakeholders to scale the TBW platform and use the incredible pace and scale of computing development for social and environmental good.

So, Tom was asking to look at the regenerative scene in mainstream farming and was asking "What's the Craic?" Read on to discover what we found.........

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