By Scott Ross

Wandering through your local grocery store, it’s impossible to ignore the rising interest in local food. Due to recent food safety crises and increasing awareness of the relationship between food and health, people want to know exactly what is in their food, where it came from and how it was produced. This demand for local food presents a variety of opportunities for regions and municipalities, which are yet to be fully understood.

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By Clark Hoskin

Each fall, economic development professionals from rural and agricultural communities across Ontario gather to compare notes. Last year, Norfolk County had the honour of hosting. This year, we all went to Northumberland County. It was a superb learning experience. Day One on October 29, 2014 included a tour of the area’s agricultural highlights, which is the focus of this post.

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By Michelle Madden

Don’t kid yourself, your community will never retain 100 per cent of its youth (and it shouldn’t try to anyway). The process of youth outmigration isn’t new either; rural and remote areas across Canada have been losing young people in significant numbers since at least 1966. That said, communities are right to be concerned about a youth exodus. When they exit en masse, it’s enough to shrink the total population, close elementary and secondary schools, and leave businesses without labour to hire or succession plans.

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By Taylor McCready 

Social media is no longer just for socializing between friends on the web, businesses have taken to using social media to interact with their consumers by seeing what they are saying about the business and their products in real time.

It is easy to comprehend how effective use of social media helps businesses to keep up with their audiences and while we are seeing this more and more and actively using it to communicate with businesses, Emily Weiss took a whole new direction by building her cosmetics line from the ground up through Instagram.

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By Luke McKee

Ever since artificial intelligence reached the main stream, we have speculated constantly on the future of robots and their effect on humanity.  From movies like 2001: a Space Odyssey, I Robot, Interstellar, and the Terminator franchise, there is a constant theme that machines have the possibility to one day do incredible things for humanity, but also to one day destroy us.  The Arnold Schwarzenegger figure returning to wipe out the human race is a constant image, have we started something that will eventually bring about our downfall?

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