Pedro Paulo Diniz is an agroforester, businessman, and former Formula 1 racing driver. Pedro transformed his family farm into Fazenda da Toca, a large-scale organic farm in Brazil’s São Paulo state, and one of the country’s leading producers of organic eggs and fruits. The farm makes use of agroforestry methods to grow a variety of trees that help to balance required biomass production with the nutritional needs of crops and animals.
Pedro looks at Fazenda da Toca as a replicable model for large-scale egg and fruits production using ecological methods. He is hopeful that through large-scale organic and biodynamic production of healthy plant and animal products, the farm will become a catalyst for sound rural development and environmental regeneration in Brazil and beyond.
Rizoma Agro is an offshoot of Fazenda da Toca and is today the project to which he dedicates himself the most. He created this company with the objective of scaling agroforestry systems and the production of grains and organic inputs. Today Rizoma operates around 100 hectares of agroforestry and 360 hectares of grains, in addition to 1000 hectares on another property. In the first ten years of he learned a lot at Toca about agroforestry systems and regenerative agriculture. It was a period of much investment in research and development to better understand and systematize this way of producing in harmony with nature. And now, with Rizoma, that knowledge has grown into a larger and growing business to foster agricultural systems that regenerate, sequester carbon, and generate life instead of destroying life.