At the age of 24, Belisa Maggi lived her first experience in the countryside between November 2008 and June 2009.
Recently graduated in law, the heiress of the Amaggi Group, the largest Brazilian grain and fiber company with annual revenues of US$ 7 billion (about R$ 38.5 billion), was looking for new professional paths.
“When I finished college in Curitiba, I saw that it wasn’t my thing. I’ve always been idealistic and it would take time to make a real impact as a lawyer or judge.”
In a hurry to find purpose, he decided to work with a couple of friends in a medicinal herb plantation aimed at the production of essential oils in Caldas Novas (GO).
The undertaking lasted eight months and ended in a police case, she says, laughing.
The experience is part of the curriculum of the current president of Fundação André e Lucia Maggi, manager of Agropecuária Pirapora and member of the board of directors of AL5 Bank.
Among the professional qualifications of today’s 38-year-old executive is advisory services for Tecnicus, in “managing medicinal plants – Long Pepper”.
At the time, Embrapa announced that it had mastered the technique for extracting safrole, a substance found in the fine branches of the plant used in the pharmaceutical industry and in perfumery.
Except that safrole is also the raw material for ecstasy, which is why it appears on Anvisa’s list of precursor substances for narcotics and psychotropic drugs.
“There were five hectares of plantation”, he reports. “I only found out later that he had this chemical component to manufacture ecstasy.”
Belisa describes this immersion in the “innovation project in agriculture” as an adventure. “The Federal Police incinerated everything. It didn’t work.”
The episode ended up convincing her father, former Minister of Agriculture Blairo Maggi, who once held the title of the world’s largest individual soy producer, that his daughter could be tested in the management of one of the family’s farms.
“That’s when he called me: ‘Come to Mato Grosso. I’ll give you a farm to run’.”
And there goes the middle daughter of the also former governor and former senator to transform 200 hectares in Chapada dos Guimarães, until then destined for cattle raising, into a grain producing unit.
“I had a notion, but you can’t say I knew how to do it”, he admits. “My father was wise. I built an inner strength in the face of that challenge.”
It started there, says Belisa, an important stage in the process of self-knowledge and the discovery of a vocation.
She had interned in a family court, worked in a beauty clinic and dropped out of a business course at the London Schooll.
“I was pretty lost,” she recalls. With her father’s encouragement, she became a trainee at the group’s headquarters in Rondonópolis, where she was born. “I passed in all areas, from commercial to HR. It was dynamic.”
At first, the pedestrians didn’t even hear me very well. It’s a very sexist environment. When a man spoke, they listened
Belisa, however, aimed at the heart of the family business. “Now, do you want to get a farm?” asked the father. His answer was no. “There was this friction and I went to Goiás”, sums up the second of three children of Blairo.
In perspective, she says she understands her father’s attitude towards her youthful impetus. “I wanted to have my own experience. Being the owner’s daughter is very complicated. You have to do twice as much to show value.”
After the failed attempt to grow long pepper in the cerrado, in two years she managed to prove that she was capable of managing a soy and cotton plantation, flagships of the Maggi family’s businesses.
“In the first year, I planted 200 hectares. The following year, another 300. Then we reached 500 hectares of planted area”, he reports. “It was a small farm, but very productive.”
The success of the first agricultural venture does not hide the hardships of a girl dressed as a farmer who needed to gain the trust of her father and employees.
“In the beginning, the pedestrians couldn’t even hear me properly. It’s a very sexist environment. When a man spoke, they listened.”
The solution was to make the manager his spokesperson, a trick that worked until he proved himself capable. It had the know-how of the company and the supervision of agronomists. “And my dad always kept an eye out.”
He lived for two years on the farm, 80 km from the capital of Mato Grosso. “It was me, my dogs and the employees. It was really good, but it was strange. On the farm, I didn’t dress up for anything. I put on boots and that was it.”
A contrast to the life of a young heiress. “I went down to the city and it wasn’t pleasant. In the countryside, relationships are truer than in society.”
When he started to stay longer in Cuiabá, he did volunteer work with children in temporary homes.
Involvement in social causes led her to be invited in 2015 to take over the foundation that bears the name of her paternal grandparents, the group’s social arm with an annual budget of 1% of the business’s net profit.
“At the foundation, which was already well structured, I understood that the social is not expressed only in assistance.”
With this more strategic view of philanthropy, she decided to create Instituto Signativo, in 2016, to support educators for the challenges of education in the 21st century.
He chose Sapezal (MT), a municipality founded by his grandfather, as a pilot for workshops in public schools. “It’s the continuation of his legacy.”
It is in the region that Belisa and her husband, administrator Caio, run a 2,000-hectare farm. “HR is mine. The rest is up to him”, she jokes. The couple split between the property and Curitiba, where she decided to live after the birth of her son four years ago.
Lucca is one of the 33 great-grandchildren of Dona Lucia, 90, the matriarch of the family. “My grandmother is an example of strength. She was always a woman who took a stand in relation to her husband”, says Belisa.
In November 1955, the couple was going through difficult times after leaving Rio Grande do Sul for Paraná.
Pregnant with her third child, Lucia was firm in a dialogue that appears in the biography “Olhar da Fortaleza”. They had been in São Miguel do Iguaçu for 20 days when her husband, an employee at a sawmill, announced that they were going to put the things on top of the truck and return to the family.
After crying and praying all night, Lucia reports having filled up the courage to decree: “André, I’m only going forward from here. Never go back”.
The verdict took the couple to Mato Grosso, where an empire was born. “If she hadn’t said that, maybe the company wouldn’t exist today”, says Belisa, about the conglomerate with 360 thousand hectares of planted area and a total production of 1.2 million tons of grains and fibers. “Amaggi grew up with the two of them.”
Belisa is one of the 16 granddaughters of the “richest woman in Brazil”. According to the Fobes list in 2022, Lucia Borges Maggi owns an estimated fortune of US$ 6.8 billion (about R$ 38 billion).
Being at the top of the list of billionaires is uncomfortable for the matriarch, says her granddaughter. “My grandmother is a very simple person.”
Widowed for 21 years, Dona Lucia lives in Rondonópolis. “She lives surrounded by her daughters, goes to mass, likes to pray the rosary with other women. She is a little lady with gigantic strength. I am very proud of her.”
Belisa is also proud of her father’s and grandfather’s legacy. “I am the daughter and granddaughter of visionary farmers who built a new way of looking at agribusiness.”
She praises the boldness of experimenting with seeds in unknown soils, creating varieties for adverse climates, contributions made by the Maggi family to transform Brazil into a power in the sector.
“Part of my dream is to see a power like agro building another, an educational power in Brazil”, she says. “It may seem utopian, but we need to have a long-term vision. Education is the greatest legacy.”
She sees agro as a future to meet the need for food and as an inducer of sustainable development.
In 2005, Greenpeace awarded Blairo Maggi the title of “Golden Chainsaw”. In the last two years, the Amaggi Group received an A in the CDP Forests global ranking, as the only Brazilian soy company to obtain the highest score in environmental risk management.
“It was also classified as the best in the world in measures against deforestation”, says Belisa. According to her, the anti-award in the past was important to make the company look at sustainability and become a reference in the world. “We have to be an example.”
Belisa advocates a dive into “real agro”. “You have to visit a farm to see how much technology there is.”
She and 11 other representatives of the third generation of the Maggi began to be prepared for the family succession. “We are qualifying ourselves, taking courses and taking advantage of the fact that the safe generation is still there.”
They have just completed the shareholder and business family development program at Fundação Dom Cabral.
The creation of a family office is under study. “This governance is very important when thinking about the sustainability of a family business.”
Before that, Belisa took an executive leadership course at Harvard and specialized in neuroscience and emotional intelligence. She gets excited when talking about the workshops with public school teachers and the newly created innovation startup in education and human development, Puppa.
“I want to leave this life having inspired people, as my grandfather did, creating opportunities for those around us and for Brazil.”
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