Green Entrepreneurs Assemble—The newsletter for green entrepreneurs and professionals.

A rising tide lifts all boats 🙂 

Hi, I am Akhoy, all the way from North-eastern India.

I put in 100s of hours every month to reach out and interview business people around the world, who are working towards creating a more sustainable future for the planet. Some of them are just starting, while others are generating millions in revenue. There are invaluable lessons you can learn from people at different stages of growing green businesses.

I live in a biodiversity hotspot myself that is undergoing rapid urbanization and deforestation (these two are BFF, to be honest). I understand the importance of successfully monetizing activities that are meant to protect the earth’s ecosystems.

Interestingly, there is very little first-hand content online on green entrepreneurship, which is why I decided to create this newsletter.

Podcasts demand a good deal of time to listen to, but the written format is easier to consume. I have also highlighted important words and phrases to make each interview a quick read.

Without further ado, let’s welcome today’s guest—

Table of Contents

1. Backstory

2. Regenerative Farming

3. Business Model and Challenges

4. Co-founder

5. What's Unique About the Business?

6. Funding

7. Day in Life

8. Recommendations

9. Thoughts on Current State of the Green Economy

10. Collaborate with Darryl

11. Plans for the Future

12. “1 Minute Summary” of the Interview

(Note: I have preserved Darryl’s voice but made light changes for readability)

🟢Please tell me your backstory. How did you start and how did you become interested in working for the planet?

Well, my background is that I worked in Hollywood for about 20 years. I was one of the youngest animators ever hired by Disney when I was 21.

I got into entertainment very early; I started doing stand-up comedy when I was 17, and actually got into the animation industry when I was 16, self-taught, and got into filmmaking as well.

It was actually while I was working at Disney, I emailed the CEO of the time, Mike Eisner, and he emailed back, and we actually started talking about the burdens of being such a large company and how it could be used for good.

And the conversation just made me realize I was climbing this corporate ladder but I realized the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

So by the time I got to the top, I wouldn't be where I wanted to be. And so, I didn't leave the industry then but I quit Disney.

I tried a few different companies because I thought maybe it was just certain companies. But I realized all companies are all about profit—that's the bottom line. And it's all about shareholder interest, not about stakeholder interests.

They don't care about the planet or who they impact in their business as long as the shareholders are happy. And to me, that's psychotic, quite frankly.

And so, that's in about 2016, my wife and I started a nonprofit called Cannapedia where we learned about the cannabis plant and the benefits it has for the environment, for the soil, for human health, all that kind of stuff.

And so we started our nonprofit to start researching and putting out information, accurate information about the cannabis plant, both good and bad.

And that led to me making a documentary called The Hemp Road Trip in 2017. And that documentary actually helped get hemp legalized federally for farmers in the US in 2018. And so that kind of made me an Enemy of the State, you know?

They froze our bank accounts, they banned me from Facebook and Twitter, and all of that. And it started a real fight. And as a result of that fight, I founded Carbon Capture Shield because I figured if you can't beat them, join them.

So I was like let's get into this carbon capture thing. But our whole thing was that we were going to use industrial hemp to sequester carbon because we actually entered the X Prize Carbon Removal Competition.

And our thing was, there's no more efficient means of getting CO2 out of the atmosphere than plants because plants are solar-powered carbon pumps.

Trees might take 20 years to reach maturity, but industrial hemp reaches maturity in three months and it sequesters about 20 times more carbon per hectare than even an old-growth rainforest.

And so, we really started pushing that, but of course, we ran into all kinds of obstacles there as well, almost bankrupted and all kinds of stuff. They wouldn't even let us open a bank account for the company. So that's how far they're going to sort of stop this message.

Then we got banned even from Reddit. So, as the company, we were in a lot of permaculture and regenerative agriculture subreddits. We would get kicked out for talking about growing crops without pesticides and herbicides.

I'm like, isn't that what permaculture is all about? And so I realized even these online spaces are controlled by the interests of the chemical corporations. 

And that sounds like a conspiracy, but when you look at it, the moderators are all paid. I have screenshots of these conversations where they would argue with me and I would send them published, peer-reviewed research showing what I was saying was 100% accurate, and they would still ban us and kick us out.

So now we're totally banned from almost all permaculture subreddits on Reddit, completely banned from Facebook, completely banned from Twitter, extremely limited on Instagram, we're restricted on LinkedIn. So yeah, it's a pretty uphill battle, to be quite frank.

🟢Tell me about regenerative farming. How does the regeneration actually happen?

The regeneration happens through the soil. So in most farming right now, they use dirt. And they use chemicals to basically sterilize the dirt, and then they plant the seeds, and they only want their seeds to grow. They don't want anything else growing in the soil.

So when that plant grows up, nature tries to come back and tries to bring in weeds because weeds aren't actually a bad thing. Weeds are nature's way of reclaiming dead ground.

Modern agrochemical farming is purely funded by the pharmaceutical industry and the agrochemical industry. And where the agrochemical industry came from was World War I.

It was called the Chemists' War. And World War I was when Germany perfected the Haber-Bosch method of pulling nitrogen out of the atmosphere and turning it into explosives.

And they created mustard gas, they created all these poison gases as well. Well, guess what? After the wars were over, they still had all these factories creating this nitrogen, and so they started marketing it to farmers.

They're like, "Hey, this nitrogen is perfect for fertilizer. Hey, all these deadly chemicals are great for pesticides."

If you look at modern farming equipment, it's built like a tank because it's built by the same corporations that built the tanks and built the bombs and created all these chemicals for warfare. Instead, they marketed them to farmers. And it's basically, we declared war on the soil, and we've killed the soil.

And how regenerative farming works is you restore the life in the soil, The fungi in the soil can dissolve solid rock to get to those nutrients.

So a plant can't dissolve solid rock, but a plant can photosynthesize CO2 and H2O into basically a carbon sugar, and they trade that at their roots with fungi, with bacteria, and with all kinds of soil organisms that will go off and find whatever the plant's looking for.

Fungal networks have been known to pump water 300 meters uphill to trade water with their plant partners. And so, once you have these living fungal networks in the soil, they will defend your plants from predators, they will defend your plants from diseases, they will find the nutrients that your plants need, and they will literally feed your plants.

So you do not need any fertilizers, you do not need any pesticides, you need no herbicides. It will take care of itself. But you need to work with nature instead of against nature.

And so that's the difference with regenerative farming. So instead of just saying, "We're going to grow corn and nothing but corn for a thousand hectares or a thousand acres," you say, "Okay, we're going to grow corn, but we're also going to grow beans, we're going to grow squash, and we're going to find the crops that work well together so that way the soil is more fertile when we harvest our crops than it was before we planted."

And that's the way regenerative agriculture works. Modern industrial chemical farming is the easy way because if you can pay for the fertilizers and all the chemicals and all the stuff, then you can get a very consistent yield, whereas regenerative farming seems like pseudoscience because it's not necessarily reliable until you understand what's happening in the soil. And once you understand that, it's very reliable. And so that's what we try to push is knowledge about that.

🟢What kind of business model are you using for your company?

So our business model is ever-evolving. How we started is not where we're at now because we actually started, we wanted to create a lawn care product and teach people. In America, they pour tons of pesticides and toxic chemicals onto our lawns throughout the US every single year.

These go down the drains and poison our water supply. We let our children crawl and play on this grass, and it's toxic. And so our idea was to educate the public by putting out a lawn care product.

Unfortunately, we got banned from Facebook, so our whole advertising campaign, everything we had planned was totally ruined. And from there, we decided instead that we're going to start creating high-tech tools for farmers to make regenerative farming as easy and as reliable as agro-industrial chemical farming currently is.

And so that's why my wife and I moved to Australia and we're living in a trailer with no running water, below the poverty line because no one wants to pay us for this work, but it has to be done.

And so we've assembled a team of researchers from all around the world, and we're developing AI-driven tools that are cutting-edge to help farmers get the most out of their soil.

🟢How did you meet your co-founders?

My wife's not involved in the business, but she supports us. I met our co-founders in many different ways. Our primary investor is a friend of ours who runs a solar energy company in Japan.

And I met him in Germany—he's German—and just started telling him about my business idea. And our other business co-founder is actually a US military contractor called Ingersoll Lockwood, and they co-founded the company with us.

And the founder of that is a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security, like a very top-level US military and government person. And they want to help start repairing the planet. And so they invested in this company and helped us get it started.

I met them just through my activism and my filmmaking, like the Cannapedia and my first film, The Hemp Road Trip, which helped change the laws in the US. That sort of attracted a lot of people to me because they could see that I was legitimate. I was in it for the right reasons.

🟢Are there other companies similar to yours, or is there anything that sets you apart from other businesses?

I say that we're the first regenerative business because as we've proven, we have not actually made any profit since we started. So we're not technically a nonprofit, but we're nonprofit because we haven't made a profit. So our goal is we're not going to extract a profit from our customers. 

We're going to create. We will not get a profit until we're able to create such a surplus that both our customers and we can extract from that surplus a profit without degrading the whole system. And so, in that sense, we're regenerative because we're not going to just come in and extract a profit and say screw all the stakeholders because we're going to look after our shareholders.

All of our shareholders recognize that we don't want a profit unless the whole planet benefits. And so, that's what sets us apart is we're truly in it to help farmers and to help the planet. And that, to us, is where we'll profit. And the whole company is founded on what we patented back in 2020, something that we call Earth Health Digital Currency. 

Right now, all human society is extractive and destructive. We come in and we mine for gold or even the way we farm is very extracted because we leave when we're done, we leave the Earth degraded and depleted.

Even mining cryptocurrency, we're extracting value, from what we've created. And what we patented is a means of generating currency through measures of ecosystem health.

So instead of extracting value from the Earth, we're measuring the life on the Earth and then saying that that is what's valuable. And if we're able to farm, and the life that was there before increases, then we earn money from that. So once you can measure the health of living ecosystems, you can start putting a value on that.

And then, through stewardship, if you increase the health of the living ecosystems, that's what we're generating our currency off of. And so, that's the biggest difference for our company is that it exists for the sole purpose of changing the way humanity creates and measures value.

🟢Currently, how are you funding your work?

Right now, it's mostly basically contributions. Almost everyone on our team is working, volunteering their work. My wife and I also are volunteering our time. So for now, unfortunately, it's operating as a nonprofit, but we built on a for-profit model.

We're a Delaware C Corporation with a hundred million shares. So once we actually get some traction, we've got huge room to grow. We're set up similar to Google or Facebook in a corporate structure. So yeah, at the moment, we're totally funded by voluntary contributions of either money, time, or resources.

🟢What does a day in your life look like currently, and do you use AI?

Currently, it's pretty chaotic because trying to earn money that will then pay our bills and then also keep the company going. I'm also starting several research projects. 

I filed several patents in the last couple of months. So it's like, yeah, it's a pretty mad scramble. And I literally just finished editing and directing another feature documentary film on hemp.

I use ChatGPT quite a lot in research, in assisting in writing patents, in assisting in writing research proposals, in assistance in writing grant proposals. For my filmmaking, I use AI to generate voiceover, for instance, and narration.

I use it to help me map out the structure of my films because I believe in storytelling based on archetypes, like Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey.

So I use AI to help me plot out my storylines and make sure they fit the arcs of various mythological structures. So yeah, I mean, AI supercharges all the work that we do because it amplifies what one person is capable of getting done when we use it correctly.

So in our software development, we use it to help code; in our research, we use it to help us research. So we use it pretty much in every aspect of our business.

🟢Is there anything that you would recommend fellow green entrepreneurs to embrace or avoid?

Well, I would definitely encourage everyone to embrace hemp and to look at the soil because the soil is where all of our crops and pretty much all life on the surface of the Earth comes from.

The soil, whether we want to admit it or not, we think we can make food in a factory, well guess what, all the raw resources come, they grow from the soil. Even if you think you eat animals, well guess what, what do those animals eat? They eat the grass that grows in the soil.

So I would encourage all green activists to look at the soil. What we're doing to it and how we're treating it. You know, right now we treat it like dirt, but we really need to treat it like gold because it is the foundation of all civilization.

🟢What are your thoughts on the current state of the green industry or circular economy or the net zero goals? And do you use a carbon credit system?

I don't believe in net zero because I think that carbon is a false measure. The carbon footprint calculator was invented by Big Oil as a publicity stunt.

And next thing you know, 20 years later, it seems to be the global standard for measuring the health of an ecosystem. It doesn't measure pollution; it doesn't measure biodiversity; it doesn't measure anything else. And in fact, CO2 is necessary in the atmosphere.

If the CO2 levels drop too far, plants won't be able to grow anymore because they need the CO2. You know, CO2 is part of the carbon cycle. To me, saying we're fighting CO2 is like saying we're fighting moisture in the air. It's like, where do you think all our rain comes from?

You know, if you don't have moisture in the air, you're not going to have rain. Oh, well, it's flooding; well, guess what, that means something's out of balance. So there's not too much carbon in the atmosphere. Now we're worried because it's 420 parts per million but Earth survived perfectly fine back around the time of the dinosaurs; it was much higher.

And what brought it down was because plants sucked that CO2 out of the atmosphere, and they built all the biomass; they laid down all that biomass, which became fossil fuels.

So it's all CO2 that comes from the atmosphere. And so I think that the wrong thing to focus on is net zero. The real thing to focus on is what impact are we having on the environment, what are our impacts on biodiversity? Because in my opinion, biodiversity is the only true measure of the health of any ecosystem because biodiversity tells you that you have a whole bunch of life living in harmony.

We're working on tools to help make measuring carbon credits more accurate. But our ultimate goal is to transcend carbon credits and move on to biodiversity credits.

🟢If you would like any of our readers to help you out with anything, what would it be, like funding, collaborations, help with any technical stuff?

If anyone wants to make contributions or investments, that would be awesome. But I think the biggest thing is to educate themselves about regenerative farming and about living soil because living soil is the foundation of the future.

And to really learn more about ecology and the natural world because nature has already solved every problem that we've created. You know, even oil spills.

What got me started in Carbon Capture Shield is I was reading about the tar sands in Canada. They found all these tar sands, and they come through and they harvest the oil, all the tar from the sand. What's left behind is a dead field of nothing but sand with traces of petroleum on it. Nothing grows on it for years.

And then they started to see dandelions popping up in the middle of these dead tar sands fields. They took the dandelion and its roots back to the lab. What they found on the root was a specific type of fungi. It was dissolving the petroleum and feeding it as sugars back to the plant.

So it was literally digesting the oil spill and transforming it into nutrients and trading it with the plant. And so if there's a fungus that can break down oil and feed it to a plant where a plant would normally die from it, then clearly, nature's already solved everything.

Then some bacteria feed off of radioactive waste. So there's something out there in nature that can solve just about every problem we've created.

And so we start looking to nature more, stop thinking that we can control everything. We're not here to control this planet; we're here to be stewards of the planet and to increase the health of existing biodiverse ecosystems.

So what I would encourage people is to look to biodiversity and look at how nature solves these problems because that's where we're going to find truly harmonious solutions.

🟢What are your future plans for Carbon Capture Shield?

Well, we just finished the film, and I believe that this film is going to be another rallying cry that's going to attract a lot of supporters, investors, and partners to us. We've patented several key technologies; we've just secured international patent rights for our main one.

And so this year, we're going to start pushing out our concept of generating currency for measures of ecosystem health. So 2024 is going to see us really laying the foundation.

So you probably won't hear too much of us this year, but if we lay the foundation right, in 2025 and beyond, hopefully, we will change the way humanity creates and measures value.

Connect with Darryl on Linkedin here: Darryl J. Nicke II | LinkedIn

🟢“1 Minute Summary” of the Interview

• Background: Darryl started in Hollywood, and worked for Disney, but left due to ethical concerns about corporate profit prioritization over planet welfare.

• Activism: Darryl founded Cannapedia, made a documentary called The Hemp Road Trip, and founded Carbon Capture Shield to promote hemp as a carbon capture solution.

• Regenerative Farming: Darryl emphasizes restoring soil health through regenerative agriculture, highlighting the importance of soil biodiversity.

• Business Model: Darryl wants to create a regenerative business model where profits are only extracted when the whole planet benefits.

• Funding: The company is currently reliant on voluntary contributions and investments.

• Advice for Green Entrepreneurs: Darryl encourages embracing regenerative agriculture and understanding the importance of soil health.

• Views on the Green Industry: Since the carbon footprint calculator was initially invented by big oil companies, Darryl emphasises the need to focus on biodiversity rather than just carbon.

• Future Plans: Darryl plans to push forward with patented technologies and introduce a concept of generating currency based on ecosystem health measures.

The next interview is with Andrew Karim, the founder of Active Kinetic 1. He has invented a new technology that can generate electricity from kinetic energy.