Inventor finds area of interest constructing excessive tech trailers for farming on Colorado’s Jap Plains | Enterprise

Michael Ring has found a new use for “retired” semitrailers: precision indoor farms he believes could operate in any climate in the world.

The 32-year-old entrepreneur, farmer and inventor lives on the eastern plains near Matheson, on a plot of land where the mountains seem to scrape the sky.

Ring grew up in Colorado Springs and worked in various IT jobs. He taught himself what he needed to know to create his portable farms.

“(I) wanted to be an inventor my whole life, which there are no real degree programs for,” Ring said. “So I just kept learning.”

Among the fields of grass and lone trees, Ring lives on a 60-acre plot. A herd of goats roam around five specialized semitrailers he converted with the help of another local resident, Brent Nunamaker.

Together, the pair designs and builds solar-powered trailers that serve as “indoor grow platforms,” equipped with digitally controlled lights, temperature and humidity among other features including door locks.

Ring builds the trailers to grow exotic plants and mushrooms; he also sells his specialized trailers to people interested in starting their own indoor farms.

“Growing food this way is honest work,” Ring said. “It’s honestly impactful work.”

Ring has sold trailers to buyers in Colorado, Washington and Oregon. He hopes that’s just the beginning.

“The things that we’re working on are honestly worthwhile,” Nunamaker said. “They’re worth doing. If we can get it right, then we can make a lasting imprint on the world.”

Ring started designing specialized semitrailers during what he called the cannabis gold rush. In 2015, he built his first trailer to grow hemp plants in Castle Rock. The business swelled for several years, but eventually went bust as larger hemp farms came online and small operations like his suffered, he said.

“I watched the whole industry just collapse from a very, very intimate level,” Ring said. “I had friends in there that were losing their farms.”

Ring decided to pivot his business. He began growing exotic plants like the Electric Daisy or paracress, whose flowers make your tongue tingle if eaten, as well as king trumpet mushrooms, a culinary delicacy.

“It’s something that people can eat, they can consume healthy nutrition, all sorts of good things,” Ring said. “And this platform is perfect for them.”

Inside the trailers, Ring and Nunamaker sprout mushrooms out of bags of hemp and straw.

Ring moved his grow operation to its current spot after he ran into a land dispute in Castle Rock. Ring said living out east he could grow and build trailers “without impedance.”

While the mushrooms and other plants proved difficult to sell from the remote plains, the trailers he built proved lucrative. Ring’s started marketing his trailers and other work, including his grow operations, on his website CleanTec. 

“There’s about 12 good reasons why semitrailers are a win for agriculture platforms,” Ring said. “Being legally declared machines and being zoning compatible is a major reason why I selected them. You can put them any place you can put a tractor, so it opens up a bigger world.” 

While Ring’s income flows from his trailer operation, his big ideas don’t end there.

Behind Ring’s hub of trailers sits a Chevy Tahoe with a contraption strapped to the roof; with it, Ring says he can run his vehicle on more than just gas.

“We have a solar panel supercapacitor, fuel cells and a deep cycle battery bank that is grid charged by the utility grid, that makes a burnable fuel that is sent to my engine,” Ring said. “This Tahoe gets 33 to 36 miles to the gallon, using this system for about six hours give or take. Without it, it gets 14 or 15.”

For Ring, designing, building and selling high-tech trailers is a way to fund his passion to invent.

“Elon (Musk) never noticed,” Ring said. Then he pointed to the Chevy and added, “He might notice that one.”