All inventors have crazy hair—or should. Most every child knows this ought-to-be fact. That and inventors live in basement laboratories and they only come out in order to be late for dinner. Imagine my surprise then, when Sonny Hayes, inventor extraordinaire, turned out to be a regular fellow with friendly eyes a warm smile. He wore leather work gloves, a bandana, and had been preparing his barn for a delivery of hay to his small ranch in Southwestern Colorado. Was this the same man that had implemented NASA research into a revolutionary LED grow light system?

As much as I might have hoped he had a sinister twin scheming in the attic, the same man who tended his horse and fed the piglets also had a knack for creatively filling a need—with much more than bailing wire and duct tape. The whole time I sat and listened to Sonny explain his invention, I couldn’t help but thinking to myself, “If I had one of these, I’d still have my basil plant!”

But how in the world did a man like Sonny, who spends time each day feeding cows and pigs and horses, manage to invent such a device? Did he really have a high-tech secret lab in his basement? The answer, as it turns out, comes from his background in the Japanese automotive industry. Yes, you heard me. I don’t think I could have imagined a stranger story.

In short, man with type-A personality follows his father’s footsteps at age 18, works up the corporate ladder, finds himself a successful corporate executive, and after 25 years has an operation on his appendix which takes him out of the game for several months. And apparently this break did more than heal his body. Call it epiphany, awakening, or a simple reevaluation of life. After the rush of the corporate scramble left him somewhat unsatisfied, Sonny wondered if a simpler approach to life might be more meaningful.

After several years of shoveling pig and cow dung, growing his own crops, and gathering eggs, Sonny felt that his choice had been a good one—but regarding vegetables…there had to be a better way to grow them at 8,000 feet above sea level in the short growing season of southwest Colorado (where the final frosts last into June and the first might come in early September). Grow lights seemed an appropriate answer—but the inefficiency of these huge, hot lamps almost seemed more hassle than help. There had to be a better, more efficient way to start off his crops in early spring without exposing them to the drastic mood swings of mother nature.

Now any other man might wonder this (especially if there’s Scottish blood in him), shrug, complain to his neighbor at the next community potluck, and go on hoping the frosts won’t come for another two weeks. But not Sonny Hayes. He recollected an article regarding NASA experimentation with LED grow lights during his days as a corporate research developer and thought something along the lines of, “Hey, it’s not space, but Colorado’s close enough.”

And so the inventor within obsessed night and day with the idea, and Sonny went for days without eating, scribbling notes and making midnight phone calls to contacts in Japan and forgetting to shave and cut his hair…or so I would like to imagine. Instead his creativity led him practically, pragmatically, and quietly to develop this remarkably efficient and effective in-home grow light and fill a need for those gardeners in the mountains southwestern Colorado—or anyone living north of Wisconsin, or those in a city apartment complex building without a good plant window, or…well, the list seems to keep growing.

Indeed, Sonny Hayes has come up with nothing short of a revolutionary product for those with restricted or inhibited growing conditions. This man with the leather work gloves and a shining joy for life in his eyes as he shoos chickens and bucks hay bales is as real a man as you’ll find on this good earth. And just so happens to be an inventor—even without the secret basement laboratory and the crazy hair.