Innovative Grower Feature: Quinn Renfandt

About Quinn Renfandt

As the President of Red River Harvest Cooperative and Controlled Environment Agriculture Expert, Quinn Renfandt is continually working on new solutions for agriculture, specifically in the realms of utilizing new technologies and energy-efficient practices. Though he doesn’t consider himself a farmer in a traditional sense, Renfandt comes from a fourth-generation family of farmers and currently operates a 5,000 square foot greenhouse on his family farm—where he is putting innovation to the test. We caught up with Renfandt to learn more.

Q: Can you introduce your operation to the readers?

A: I have a small vegetable operation that I started about four years ago. I have a geothermal system in the greenhouse, though I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s innovative—I think it’s just the DIY YouTube version; I’m mainly just learning how to build out the workflow and the operation itself. And that has led me to get a broad view of what other operations are doing and tapping into what I could or could not do. Right now, my primary focus is on energy and what I can do to reduce my energy costs. So, whether that be solar wind or setting up an array [of options] and seeing what kind of return I can get on that. I just talked to a local power company, and they said, you can sell (x) amount back to the grid. I don’t know if that’s a viable justification for the upfront cost of something like that, but it’s definitely eco-friendly.

Q: Are you leaning one way or another with any of those technologies?

A: I’m definitely going fully electric. Right now, the heating system is a fossil fuel heating system. I want to switch that over to electric and then have that run off of a wind generator and/or solar, which is happening this year.

Q: Your greenhouse operation sits on your family farm, correct?

A: Yes, I am technically the fourth generation.

Q: Can you tell me about your family’s operation?

A: I don’t know how long ago they stopped farming the land because we started renting everything out. We’ve pretty much just been renting out the acreage. I looked at purchasing some equipment that I’ll probably end up doing as a hobby. I don’t know if it’d be feasible for me to really get into farming on a large scale without taking on a significant amount of debt to do that operation. It’s pretty much all managed by other ranchers that we have come in.

Q: So you never grew up farming?

A: Not traditionally—we didn’t deal with livestock. And of course, I’ve dealt with the combine, but I was never tasked with anything major. Some of what we had was just open grassland. And so we cut that and turned it into hay, and that was a whole operation.

Q: What got you into this space?

A: My motivation was just to jump into different growing methods, specifically aquaponics and hydroponics, and look at how we could build those out in controlled environments. This is great because you can localize the food supply, specifically specialty crops, fruits, and vegetables. I’ve just been building my own version of that and slowly scaling that up.

Q: What spurred that?

A: I just had a distaste for the way that the food system is operating at the current moment, and really just wanted to put myself in a position where I could learn as much about the way the system worked so that I can hopefully become an innovator in this space. And it’s been about four years since I got started in this and now I feel like I understand it enough to at least talk about what should be done differently—and hopefully build myself up financially to have some piece of that too.

Q: What are you growing this year?

A: This year, there will be six different varieties of tomatoes, two different varieties of cucumbers, and various peppers, and then we’re going to experiment with some melons. My end goal for that is working with specific culinary applications, whether that be like a hot sauce maker or a chef that is looking for some new flavor on their menu; bringing in seeds and varieties of vegetables from anywhere around the world, and then growing them in a controlled environment. And ideally, I’ll be able to sell that to a local chef who would never have that option. And even with the shorter growing season, a greenhouse extends it long enough to get that pepper to maturity.

Q: What are the viable growing seasons for your greenhouse?

A: You can grow in the summer, which is primarily what I have been doing. I can also grow in the wintertime, but the heating costs [and efficiency] are some things I need to figure out. Because you need to keep your temperatures at a nice balmy 75 to 80 degrees to really get the higher yields out of tomato or pepper—and it’s just expensive in the wintertime. The other side of that is there’s not enough sunlight, so you have to install supplemental lighting. [The challenge] is working against nature, because things generally don’t grow here at least a solid six months of the year.

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What are aquaponics and hydroponics?

Aquaponics is a system of aquaculture in which the waste produced by farmed fish or other aquatic animals supplies nutrients for plants grown hydroponically, which then purify the water.

Hydroponics is the process of growing plants in sand, gravel, or liquid, with added nutrients but without soil.

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Q: Are you going to build more thermal greenhouses?

A: Yeah, I’m looking at building the next two or three right now. So I’m coming out with the next prototype, so to speak, hopefully by the end of this year.

Q: Where do you see the operation heading?

A: The direction I’m personally going to take is traceability. If we’re speaking about innovation, it kind of goes off the farm. I see there’s a gap in the traceability mechanisms in place for small-farm agriculture, specifically. And then the example I give is, if you have a school buying from multiple producers, and someone gets sick at that school, right now, there’s no real efficient way to identify quickly where that potential contamination came from.

In which case let’s say it’s carrots—and you source it from like five or six different small-scale local producers according to the rules. And to see how things would be handled—and for all operations to stop their sales of that particular product— can be very detrimental to the amount of effort and time you put in depending on how big of a percentage of your operation that particular crop is.

So if we had some type of mechanism that could hold that information of where things were sourced from and give the end user a real-time view of where their product came from, then you can save a lot of products and you can save a lot of money for a local area. Figuring out how to develop something like that from the perspective of small-scale farmer is what I perceive myself diving into.

With a passion for addressing the food waste system through traceability and seeking innovative solutions for growing methods like aquaponics and hydroponics, Quinn Renfandt is a true innovator, and we’re excited to see the continual growth and development of his operation.