# Renaissance Ag

**Type:** venture
**Status:** Draft
**Confidence:** Medium
**Focus:** hydroponic livestock feed, water efficiency, arid-land agriculture, climate-smart ag, hardware
**Stage:** Commercializing (customer deployments, reported backlog in 2024–2025)
**Location:** Vineyard, UT
**Updated:** 2026-06-19
**Needs-reviewed:** 2026-06-19
**Hero:** https://picsum.photos/seed/renaissance-ag-pasturebox/1600/1100
**Pull:** *A self-contained hydroponic container that produces 2,000 lbs of fresh livestock feed per day on less than 10% of the water pasture grazing requires — built for Utah ranchers in the driest stretch of the American West.*
**Relates:** cites [Official Website: Renaissance Ag](renaissance-ag-official-website.md)

## Summary

Renaissance Ag builds PastureBox — a fully automated, climate-controlled, 40-foot container-format hydroponic sprouting system that produces fresh sprouted-grain livestock feed from seed (typically wheat or barley). The system generates approximately 2,000 lbs per day of fresh sprouts, requiring less than 10% of the water that conventional pasture grazing or alfalfa irrigation demands per unit of feed produced. The Utah Department of Agriculture independently verified the 90%+ water reduction claim.

The company is not working on novel biology — sprouted fodder is a known technique. The contribution is the engineered system: automated climate control, consistent biomass output, mold suppression, minimal operator intervention, and commercial-grade reliability in a deployable container format. By 2024 the company had dozens of commercial customer deployments with a reported order backlog.

## Impact

The arithmetic of why this matters is straightforward: roughly 70% of Utah's water consumption goes to livestock feed, primarily alfalfa irrigation, and the bulk of that water is diverted from rivers that once flowed into [Great Salt Lake](great-salt-lake.md). Every PastureBox that displaces alfalfa irrigation at a ranch is a measurable reduction in the Great Salt Lake's primary threat. If water rights reform or scarcity pricing ever forces reckoning with agricultural water consumption in the West, PastureBox economics improve significantly. For now, the case rests on individual-ranch economics and the 90% water reduction claim.

The world-changing counterfactual depends on scale: dozens of deployments moves the needle locally; hundreds of thousands would matter statewide. The gap between those two is what this company is trying to cross.

## What They Are Building

The PastureBox: a 40-foot shipping-container-format automated hydroponic sprouting system. Key engineering challenges are consistent biomass production across temperature swings and water-chemistry variance, mold prevention in a humid enclosed environment, harvesting without manual labor, and wash-down protocols that maintain sanitation. The system is designed for operation by ranch and dairy employees without specialized training.

The roadmap likely includes scale (larger systems, multi-unit farms), energy efficiency improvements (the container runs on standard electrical hookup), and integration with precision-feeding systems for different livestock categories.

## What They Need Now

Mechanical and controls engineers with experience in agricultural or food-processing equipment; agricultural operations people who understand ranching and dairy workflows; sales and customer-success staff who can reach ranch and dairy decision-makers; and supply-chain operators who can scale a hardware business. Small-company culture at commercialization stage — individual leverage is high.

## Who Could Help

Utah Department of Agriculture relationships (already validated the water claim — an important credentialing relationship); water-policy advocates who can make the regulatory case for subsidizing water-efficient feed systems; ranch and dairy associations who can validate product fit and open referral networks; equipment-finance companies who understand agricultural hardware; and ranching-trade media.

## Utah Context

Renaissance Ag is a Vineyard, Utah hardware company in the heart of the Utah ag corridor, building a product directly responsive to the West's water crisis. It connects naturally to [Great Salt Lake](great-salt-lake.md) as a partial solution to the irrigation water demand driving lake decline, and to [USU Integrated BioSystems](usu-integrated-biosystems.md) as part of Utah's land-grant agricultural research ecosystem. For the [Utah Deep-Tech Map](utah-deep-tech-map.md), it represents the ag-hardware thread of Utah's sustainability story.

## Evidence

- [Official Website: Renaissance Ag](renaissance-ag-official-website.md)

## Open Questions

- Website URL (renaissance-ag.com) — verify this is the active domain; the "Renaissance Ag" name is shared with unrelated companies.
- PastureBox economics vs. commodity hay: competitive at what hay price point? At $200/ton hay, does a PastureBox pay back in under 3 years?
- Livestock performance data on sprouted fodder diets: milk production consistency, beef gain rates — this is the rancher's primary concern and the data should be publicly available from customer deployments.
- Imagery: hero is a placeholder pending a license-clean photo of a PastureBox installation.