Not every revolution starts off in an office building; many times a revolution starts at a place like workshop that is located at the end of a quiet farm where a person with greasy hands and a blueprint framed in his mind is working on a new idea or solution to a problem that nobody has thought of yet. That person is Frank W. Faulring. He is a design engineer, has eight patents, has received the American Society of Agricultural Engineers’ AE50 Award for Agricultural Engineering Innovation seven times, and is the creator & President of Faulring Mechanical Devices, Inc.
He built this company not for headlines, but for results. For more than three decades, Frank W. Faulring has operated at the intersection of ingenuity and practicality, designing machines that feed nations and outlast the trends that surround them. He does not chase scale. He chases solutions. And in that pursuit, he has left a mark on agricultural engineering that very few individuals can claim.
From Humble Beginnings to a Builder’s Blueprint
Frank W. Faulring grew up in Western New York with parents who were not wealthy, but who gave him something more valuable than money- the habit of making do. From childhood, he was a tinkerer. He built things from spare parts, leftover materials, and whatever happened to be within arm’s reach. The classroom did not always hold him, but science and technology never let go. He pursued both college entrance courses and vocational trades simultaneously in high school- a dual path that turned out to be the foundation of everything that followed. Frank W. Faulring went on to study automotive technology in college, but the moment he entered the working world, his direction became clear. Special purpose-built machinery was where he belonged, and no corporate job description was going to capture that.
Frank W. Faulring understood early that formal education was only half the equation. The other half lived in workshops, on farms, and in conversations with mentors who had already made the costly mistakes he wanted to avoid. He taught himself computers, CAD, and solid modelling long before those tools became standard. He built his knowledge the same way he built his machines: piece by piece, with patience and precision.
The Inventor for Hire: Finding the Perfect Problem
Frank W. Faulring never wanted a traditional start-up. He had watched too many of them collapse before their fifth year, leaving founders financially gutted and professionally bruised. So, he thought differently. He looked not for a product line, but for a service model; one that matched his skills, his temperament, and his tolerance for risk. The answer came to him on a large vegetable production farm, during a visit that changed the entire direction of his career.
Standing in that field, Frank W. Faulring noticed something that most people would have walked straight past: the only mass-produced machine on the entire property was the tractor. Every other piece of equipment, planters, harvesters, conveyors, had been custom-built by the farm’s own fabrication shop. Those shops were skilled with metal, but they lacked engineers. They could not design the sophisticated machines their growing operations demanded. And the major agricultural machine manufacturers had no interest in filling that gap, because the production volumes were too small to justify their investment.
“I didn’t want to follow the traditional path. I wanted to find the space between two worlds that nobody else was occupying, and build something extraordinary there.”
That unoccupied space became Frank’s territory. He positioned himself precisely between the fabrication shop and the corporate manufacturer, conceiving the design, building the models, developing working prototypes, and then handing volume production over to contract manufacturers. He called himself an inventor for hire, and it was a perfect description. He kept the operation deliberately small. Angel investors, usually the end users themselves, provided the funding. No marketing was needed. He was selective about the clients he took on. One innovation at a time, all energy forward. It was the ideal model for the mind he brought to the work.
A Life Designed for Creative Freedom
Frank runs Faulring Mechanical Devices, Inc. from his home in North Collins, New York, and that is no accident. Adjacent to his house, sit offices, model and prototype shops, an indoor year-round ground-engaging test stand, and secure test fields for intellectual property trials. The setup reflects a central conviction: creativity does not flourish under the wrong conditions. By removing the daily commute and building a space where he can act on an idea at any hour, Frank has engineered the environment his best work demands. He finishes a day of intense technical effort and still has energy for his wife, children, and grandchildren. When travel takes him to client sites, field trials, or conference speaking engagements, family comes along whenever possible, and a smartphone handles the rest.
Driven by Fire: The Passion That Never Clocks Out
Frank W. Faulring does not describe his work as a career. He describes it as a hobby he gets paid to do, and that distinction reveals everything. As a boy, he was building go-carts and mini bikes. As a young husband, he built the family home from the ground up. Engineering gave that lifelong creative restlessness a professional channel, and it has never lost its force. Frank is deeply inquisitive, questions everything, and chases long shots with a calm certainty that others reserve for sure things. Bureaucracy drains him. Repetition bores him. New challenges pull him forward with a kind of gravitational inevitability.
He travels to see how other cultures solve problems. He meets new people and absorbs perspectives that sharpen his own. He takes on projects others walk away from and stays long after others leave. At the core of it all is a conviction that transcends professional ambition: contributing positively to society is not a byproduct of his work; it is the entire point of it.
Strengths, Hard Truths, and the Wisdom Earned in Between
Frank W. Faulring speaks about his strengths without theatrics and about his weaknesses without apology. His greatest professional asset, he says, is his dual platform of education- the combination of academic training and skilled trades that the modern workforce consistently undervalues. His commitment to self-education has kept him relevant across four decades of technological change. Frank has developed a thick skin against naysayers, learned when to trust his instincts, and mastered the art of blending proven old methods with untested new ones. He always looks at the big picture. He always does what is right.
Frank W. Faulring is equally candid about his limitations. He is not a natural salesman; he tells people what is true, not what they want to hear. His grammar and spelling have tested him. Keeping pace with electronics remains a challenge. And he names the hardest truth of the inventor’s life without flinching: watching a project you poured five years into, one standing at the edge of its final breakthrough, get shut down without warning because funding dried up or the market shifted. Frank has lived through that more than once. He carries those moments not as wounds, but as the sharpest education he has ever received.
A Record That Speaks for Itself
Frank’s professional legacy is built on a foundation of patents, peer-recognised innovations, and published research that spans more than three decades. He holds eight patents- covering transplanting systems, harvesting equipment, and ground-engaging mechanisms. His most recent, US Patent No. 12,029,166 for a Harvester with Automatic Targeting Capabilities, was granted on July 9, 2024. His earliest, US Patent No. 4,941,416, dates to July 17, 1990. Between them lies a body of work that has repeatedly pushed the frontier of what agricultural machinery can do.
The American Society of Agricultural Engineers has recognised Frank W. Faulring with its AE50 Award for Outstanding Innovation seven times- in 1988, 1992, 1998, twice in 2003, 2004, and 2005. Each award marked a separate breakthrough. His research has been presented at international engineering meetings. His work has been featured in American Vegetable Grower Magazine, Farm Show Magazine, The Buffalo News, California Farm Press, and an AgriScience Explorations textbook used in classrooms across the country. Frank’s personal achievements run just as deep: a son who grew up in his workshop and now works as a systems integrator at a major engineering firm; a daughter who homeschools her two children with the same creative dedication her father brought to everything he built; and a wife who, in his own words, is the one who held it all together.
Strive for Perfection. Live with Reality.
Frank’s personal mantra is a study in honest ambition. ‘Strive for Perfection, Live with Reality’ carries three distinct layers. The first is to aim high: to push past the comfort zone and take on something harder than before, while staying grounded in what is genuinely achievable. The second is to innovate boldly: to identify real, unmet needs and pursue them with research and courage rather than defaulting to safe, incremental steps. The third is the most unsparing: ensure that the work fits the world as it actually exists today. Many innovations fail not because they are wrong, but because they arrive before the world is ready to receive them.
His counsel to those starting out is equally direct: find a passion, ideally one that began as a hobby, and figure out whether you can earn a living from it. Avoid head-on competition early on. Solve problems that technology can make recession-proof. Retain ownership through patents or trade secrets. And build in a way that does not collapse everything if things go wrong. These are not theories. They are the distilled lessons of a man who has navigated one of the most demanding professional paths in American industry- entirely on his own terms.
The Next Chapter: Leading from a Deeper Place
Frank W. Faulringis now moving with intention toward a lighter workload. He is not stepping back; he is stepping into a different kind of leadership. He is shifting toward an advisory role: offering strategic vision, technical guidance, and the kind of insight that only comes from having conceived, built, failed, rebuilt, and ultimately succeeded across a career that resists easy definition. He believes he has significant value to offer people and companies pushing their own ideas forward, and he is right.
Frank W. Faulring is the kind of engineer this industry does not manufacture; it only discovers. He came from little, built much, and gives generously of everything he has learned.
In a world that rewards noise and scale, Frank W. Faulring chose depth and precision. He built a company on the belief that one person, working with focus and integrity, can solve problems that entire corporate divisions walk past without noticing. The fields he helped feed are more productive for it. And the next problem he turns his attention to, will be better solved for having him in the room.
