The influence of COVID-19 on agricultural economy and emergency mitigation measures in China: A text mining analysis

Understanding the influence of COVID-19 on China's agricultural economy and the Chinese government's emergency measures to ease the economic impacts of viral spread can offer urgently-needed lessons while this virus continues to spread across the globe. Thus, this study collected over 750,000 words upon the topic of COVID-19 and agriculture from the largest two media channels in China: WeChat and Sina Weibo, and employed web crawler technology and text mining method to explore the influence of COVID-19 on agricultural economy and mitigation measures in China. The results show that: (1) the impact of COVID-19 on China's agricultural economy at the very first phase is mainly reflected in eight aspects as crop production, agricultural products supply, livestock production, farmers' income and employment, economic crop development, agricultural products sales model, leisure agriculture development, and agricultural products trade. (2) The government's immediate countermeasures include resuming agricultural production and farmers' work, providing financial support, stabilizing agricultural production and products supply, promoting agricultural products sale, providing subsidies, providing agricultural technology guidance and field management, and providing assistance to poor farmers to reduce poverty. (3) The order of government's immediate countermeasures is not all in line with the order of impact aspects, which indicates that more-tailored policies should be implemented to mitigate the strikes of COVID-19 on China's agricultural economy in the future.