The farm Itirapina, from 2008

In 2003 an old friend, the television presenter Fernanda Lima, sent Pedro Diniz to a yoga class. He has practised ever since. There, as he put it later, he found more normal people, with more real interests, and through yoga he met the actress Tatiane Floresti, who became his wife. He calls yoga the thread that led him back to the farm.

He had come home to Brazil at the end of 2001, after the failure of the Prost venture, and spent the next years running Formula Renault. The opening that changed his life came from the family business. After his father’s agreement at Grupo Pão de Açúcar in 2005 and 2006, the family set up an office to manage its own assets, separate from the company, and chose Pedro to run it. Among those assets was a farm at Itirapina, in the interior of São Paulo state, some 200 km from the city: the Fazenda da Toca, in the family since 1970.

He knew the place: as a boy he had ridden a motorbike over it, as São Paulo tells, and its name comes from its cave, for a toca is a den or a burrow. It is a big property, about 2,300 hectares, with a golf course and a polo field that the family used, and when he took it over its groves were farmed in the conventional way: oranges, and coffee too by one account.

What made him want to change it came in 2006. That year his first child, a son, was born; that year too he watched An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s film. He has told the story more than once; to the magazine Trip, in 2012, he told it like this:

E, no ano em que a Tati ficou grávida do Pedrinho, vi aquele filme do Al Gore, Uma verdade inconveniente. Aquilo mexeu muito comigo. Caramba, estou colocando um filho no mundo e o mundo está detonado. Como esse moleque vai viver lá na frente?

And in the year Tati was pregnant with little Pedro, I saw that Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth. It really shook me. Blimey, I’m bringing a son into the world and the world is wrecked. How is this kid going to live, further down the line?

Telling his father was harder. He said he was thinking of leaving São Paulo and buying half of the family’s share in the farm, and as Pedro remembered it, Abílio was doubtful: “He didn’t really understand; he thought I wouldn’t manage to live here.” Whether he bought the half has not been reported.

Organic, and on a large scale

The Toca project began in 2008.¹ The conversion of the groves to organic farming began the next year and took three years. Late in 2009, or thereabouts, he moved to the farm with his wife and their son, and they built a school there for their own children and the workers’. A non-profit, the Instituto Toca, followed, to teach sustainability.

He wanted size. An organic product, he said, cost 15 per cent more than a conventional one in Germany and twice as much in Brazil: “The good thing about large scale is that it democratises organic food.”

By May 2012, when he spoke to Trip, the Toca was by the magazine’s account the largest producer of organic milk in Brazil. It made cheese, yoghurt and juice, and sold organic eggs and fruit, some of them under Pão de Açúcar’s own label, Taeq. About 50 families worked there, a second child had been born, and the farm was about to launch its own brand. Asked how he pictured himself at 60, he said:

Me imagino aqui. A vida fora de grandes centros faz muito sentido pra nós, a gente não sente falta. Talvez de um cinema [ risos ].

I picture myself here. Life away from the big cities makes a lot of sense for us; we don’t miss it. Maybe a cinema [laughs].

He wanted to control the whole chain, to add value to what the farm grew and, he believed, to make it better. By 2015 there were a juice factory, a dairy and a plant for packing eggs on the farm, and he forecast revenue of R$26 million and a first profit that year. In December 2015 the egg company, Fazenda da Toca Orgânicos, was certified as a B Corporation by the non-profit B Lab.

Trees among the crops

From 2011 the Toca began to plant sistemas agroflorestais, agroforestry, in which crops grow among trees. Its citrus went in beside bananas, planted as a source of nutrients. When he began to talk of reforesting, he recalled in 2015, people told him it was only good for family farms; the Toca, he said, was proving otherwise: “we’re showing that it does make sense, and that it will bring a financial return.”

Later the Toca worked with Ernst Götsch, the Swiss-born pioneer of syntropic farming. By 2016 the farm and Götsch had a research project to take his methods to a large scale, and that November a speaker at a hearing of the environment committee of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies cited what he had seen at the Toca and asked for support for Götsch’s work.

By the company’s own account, the Toca’s agroforestry was shown at the climate conference in Paris, COP21, in December 2015. For taking Götsch’s methods to scale, Diniz had a motto:

Simplifying the business

Controlling everything nearly broke the business. The dairy and the juice factory lost money. In 2017 he closed them, dismissed about a third of the staff and turned the Toca over to organic eggs, for which demand was growing twice as fast as for conventional ones. He had had to go back and simplify the business, he said in 2018 to Folha de S.Paulo, whose reporter noted the white hairs the lay-offs had added to his early grey. The same article gave his verdict on the result: “Today the Toca has become a good business on three legs: social, environmental and financial.”

The claims grew with the flock. In 2018 the company put its share of Brazil’s organic egg market at 48 per cent. By 2022 it had 360,000 hens laying 300,000 eggs a day, and Brazil Journal and Folha called it the largest organic egg producer in Latin America. The market share is the company’s figure, as the press reported it.²

Not everyone was persuaded. At a debate on the new agriculture held by Folha in June 2017, with the chef Alex Atala on the panel, Diniz reported 350 hectares of organic maize yielding 9.8 tonnes a hectare, as much, he said, as conventional farming, and he made his case: “I believe the world can be fed with organic food.” The head of the cotton growers’ association, at the same debate, said he could not see how the world could be fed on organic farming alone.

Rizoma

In February 2018 he co-founded a second company, Rizoma Agro, registered as Rizoma Agricultura Regenerativa S.A., with Fábio Sakamoto and Marcelo Marzola and seed money of about US$8 million. Its business was what it called regenerative organic farming of grain, citrus and cattle, begun on two pilot farms, the Toca and a farm called Takaoka. By its own account, it turned four hectares of the Toca’s agroforestry into 50 hectares of Tahiti limes planted with timber trees. By 2019 it described itself as Brazil’s largest producer of organic grain, and it sold to Nestlé, Unilever and Tyson Foods. He saw its work as the proof the big producers needed before they would change, for, as he put it, “no producer will migrate from a conventional model to a 100% regenerative organic model without having a proof that the model is viable”.

In 2020 Rizoma raised R$25 million through a green agribusiness bond, presented as the first agricultural bond certified under the Climate Bonds Initiative’s criteria for agriculture, and Bloomberg reported that Diniz had put about R$40 million of his own money into the company. He was aiming at 350,000 hectares within a decade, and the company at a million hectares regenerated by 2030. Once organic food could be grown at scale for the same price as conventional, he told Bloomberg, change would come fast; the big buyers of grain were telling Rizoma they could buy everything it produced; and Brazil, instead of leading, was harming itself by relaxing the rules that protected its biodiversity. He put his case in business terms:

It’s not about being an idealist, a dreamer

That November, in a live interview with IstoÉ Dinheiro, he called the Bolsonaro government’s environmental policy short-sighted, and bad for the image of Brazilian agribusiness.

A visitor from Formula One

In November 2021, between the Mexican and Brazilian Grands Prix, Sebastian Vettel, who had never met him, came to see the Toca after reading about it; he had also visited Jody Scheckter’s organic farm in England. Vettel told The Race why he had come:

I actually read his name recently not in a motor racing connection, but in what he is trying to do with his farming project.

A month later Diniz talked about fear, yoga and organic food on Formula One’s own podcast, Beyond the Grid.

The sale

On 6 December 2022 Mantiqueira, South America’s largest egg producer, agreed to buy the whole of Fazenda da Toca Orgânicos, its brand and its assets, and Rizoma’s grain operation, with its machines, silos and warehouses. The price was not disclosed. The land was not sold but was to be leased, and the deal went through in 2023. Both companies, Brazil Journal reported, had been created in partnership with Península, his father’s family office. Mantiqueira’s founder, Leandro Pinto, was plain about what he had bought:

A relevância dessa aquisição em termos de volume não é muito grande, mas em termos de marca e de posicionamento a importância é enorme.

In terms of volume this acquisition isn’t very significant, but in terms of brand and positioning its importance is enormous.

Diniz told the same paper that his companies had measured their system of production and found that it sequestered two tonnes of carbon a hectare, where ordinary grain farming emits five; the measurements are the companies’ own. In January 2025 JBS bought half of Mantiqueira, which lists Fazenda da Toca among its brands. Rizoma went on: in 2024 Heineken’s new sustainability unit in Brazil announced an organic lemon project with it, more than 800 hectares of agroforestry near the brewery at Itu.

The heir

The Brazilian press still tends to call him herdeiro, the heir, before anything else, and some of it has told his story as that of a rich man who gave up his fortune for a simple life in the country. The record is plainer. He stayed a shareholder of Pão de Açúcar and sat on its board, for 10 years by one account, and on the board of Península; and he admitted to Trip the contradiction of yoga in the morning and a private plane to the Caribbean afterwards. It was his reality, he said, and he could not deny it. He changed his life, not his wealth.

By 2018 he had moved back to São Paulo. He rode an electric bicycle to Rizoma’s office in Vila Madalena and still weighed what he had weighed as a racing driver. That year he was a finalist for Folha’s prize for social entrepreneurs, and by 2024 he sat on the board of Project Drawdown, the American climate non-profit.

What he made of his birth he had already said, in 2012:

Já fui encanado de ter nascido na família Diniz. Hoje, acredito que a gente vem ao mundo e recebe algo. E o que posso fazer é transformar o que tenho em um bem maior para todo mundo.

I used to be hung up about being born into the Diniz family. Today I believe we come into the world and receive something. And what I can do is turn what I have into a greater good for everyone.