  The trends and reactions of the general public towards global events can be
analyzed using data from social platforms, including Twitter. The number of
tweets has been reported to help detect variations in communication traffic
within subsets like countries, age groups and industries. Similarly, publicly
accessible data and (in particular) data from social media about agricultural
issues provide a great opportunity for obtaining instantaneous snapshots of
farmer opinions and a method to track changes in opinion through temporal
analysis. In this paper we hypothesize that the presence of keywords like
precision agriculture, digital agriculture, Internet of Things (IoT), BigData,
remote sensing, GPS, etc., in tweets could serve as an indicator of discussions
centered around interest in modern farming practices. We extracted relevant
tweets using keywords such as IoT, BigData and Geographical Information System
(GIS), and then analyzed their geographical origin and frequency of their
mention. We analyzed the Twitter data for the period of 1st -11th January 2018
to understand these trends and the factors affecting them. These factors, such
as special events, projects, biogeography, etc., were further analyzed using
tweet sources and trending hashtags from the database. The regions with the
highest interest in the keywords were United States, Egypt, Brazil, Japan and
China. A comparison of frequency of keywords revealed IoT as the most tweeted
word (77.6%) in the downloaded data. The most used language was English
followed by Spanish, Japanese and French. Periodical tweets on IoT from an
account handled by IoT project on Twitter and Seminars on IoT in January in
Santa Catarina (Brazil) were found to be the underlying factors for the
observed trends.
