F5/Food Connects With It
November 04th, 2013
A new event will connect IT and food specialists in Wolfville, N.S., in January in the hopes of fostering new ideas and partnerships. F5/Food will be held at Wolfville’s Acadia University and will take the form of a 48-hour Idea Lab.
“The idea is to set aside two days to design new solutions in the new media space that focuses on one of our greatest assets here in the Annapolis Valley — food,” said Melissa Quinn, manager of the Acadia Centre for Rural Innovation, which is organizing the event.
“We have created an incubation lab event where people across new media and agricultural industries can come together for a weekend to rethink the age old problems of: production, distribution, and consumption.”
Quinn said Nova Scotia’s food industry faces many challenges, including distribution issues and distance from markets. “We’re small scale so we cannot compete in commodity agriculture,” she said. “We need to come up with new ideas for distribution, marketing, value-added agricultural products, and new ways to create wealth in the farming and IT communities.”
The event will be held Jan. 17-19 and is the brainchild of Mike Caplan, founder of Refresh Annapolis Valley, a new media professional association that helps grow the Valley’s tech industry.
Quinn said the event ties in with the new business incubator that will be launched at the university on November 18. The incubator will focus on IT, agriculture and agri-food and tidal power.