Social media sites are a place where a lot of different topics get discussed every day, including agriculture. It is why Potatoes USA developed new software to see just how popular their product really is.
“Well, we are working on creating a artificial intelligence system that will actually monitor, track what’s happening on social media. So Twitter, for example, what’s the sentiment is about potatoes. Now, there’s thousands of tweets every day about potatoes, a lot of them are very just basic, you know, someone said, ‘I just made a baked potato and I loved it’ or whatever it is, but some of them are misinformation. That they say potatoes make you fat, for example, or potatoes are not good if you have diabetes, which are these are scientifically proven to not be accurate statements. So we use the research that the Alliance for Potato Research and Education has been investing in for the past 15 years, and that body of evidence plus all the other research that’s out there about potatoes that the industry didn’t fund to come up with an answer or a response to those things whenever there’s something that’s incorrectly stated about potatoes,” said Blair Richardson.
Richardson says this kind of information comes at a cost and that the initial investment is about half a billion dollars, costing about $100,000 a year.
