The Lipstick Farmer”
My guest is Elaine Culotti, “The Lipstick Farmer”. She owns a 40-acre Big Z ranch in Fallbrook, California. She was on the TV show Undercover Billionaire. She grows everything from palm trees to fruits and vegetables. Culotti has partnered with local farmers to make it easier for fresh food to be sold directly to consumers. She’s come up with an idea called the “559. First the train transforms, then it commutes”. She says the U.S. is the most wasteful country on the planet. Farmers lose over 50% of their crops to waste due to supply chains. And because freight is so expensive nowadays, Elaine’s come up with the idea of using rail cars.
Elaine, how did you come up with this idea?
Well, I mean, look, what we’re doing to transportation in California is shameful. It’s just shameful. And the truckers are getting killed. It’s not just the truckers, though. It’s supply chain in general. It affects everybody. And we got a good look at what that was going to look like during COVID when they shut things down. Why we didn’t start four years ago, five years ago, really trying to fix this problem is beyond me. It’s just indicative of our management, you know? It’s the same thing over. Repeat, mistake, repeat, mistake, repeat.
The truckers need help. And I think the critical path is to change a lot of the trucking regulations, you know, of course. Why are we dictating their hours and how many miles they can drive and how much has to be electric and how much has to be gas and putting in constraints on, you know, using electric vehicles when there’s no place to charge them? And it’s really just a crying shame.
I definitely think you might be onto something, especially freight in California. It’s so expensive. The fuel, the maintenance, the insurance, it just goes on and on. But we need our freight. And if this is another great idea with the rail, we definitely got to look into it.
It’s too expensive to move. I mean, we put the burden on the small farmer. I’m really working on this sort of pay to play for big ag and for pay to play for really big food distributors, you know? And I mean the big ones like US Foods, Cisco, Driscoll, Henkel, all the biggies. Give us your long haul on rail. Give us 10%. That’s it, just 10%. That’ll get some trucks off the road. That’ll free up your truck drivers to be able to really utilize their local paths. Gives them a little bit of a break on the fuel and then take all the money you save and put it into farming, transporting farming. And we’ll do twice as much in short runs and local, you know, last mile delivery and get those giant trucks out of long haul so that they can really make some money. And the wear and tear and the wear and tear on the vehicles and what we’re doing to small farming, making these guys drive their stuff everywhere, they can’t afford it.
They can’t.
They just can’t afford it.
Fresno, the Central Valley has a train track going right through the Central Valley. That’s got to be pretty simple to figure out, right?
Well, you’re coming out of Fresno, so you know really well, there’s like a lot of these big refrigeration facilities. There’s one in Delano. I went into this thing. I saw it. It was closed too. Its Union Pacific served. It’s like 200,000 square feet, giant subs. It’s like a 200. It is, in fact, a 200,000 square foot refrigerator that is closed. It’s not even open. Talk about resources. And it is truck served to rail. So, you can put all your stuff in there. You can have little compartments and then the train car pulls right up to it and you just load it into the rail car. It’s easy peasy.
There are some companies I know in Bakersfield are using rail and they’re very efficient. This is a great idea. And you’re calling it 559?
559, the area code of Fresno, baby. 559 farm train. That’s right.
And Elaine, tell everyone how you got started in farming and how you became a movie star on Undercover Billionaire?
Farming really for just personal health reasons and just having some, you know, control over my food intake. And I have this huge farm. And then, when I was chosen to do Undercover Billionaire by Glenn Stearns, you know, who’s a great guy. And it was Discovery Network, a really big opportunity for me. It happened to be during COVID.
So, there was nothing going on in my world, like a lot of people. And I just took the time. I said, I’m going to do three months of hard time in Fresno and I’m going to make it happen. And I loved Fresno. And I fell in love with three things in Fresno, which are probably really Central Valley things. I fell in love with the work ethic of the people. There are tough, hardworking entrepreneurs in Fresno. I fell in love with that.
The second thing I fell in love with was the food basket. America’s food basket, the fruit, the stone fruit, the almonds, everything, the pluots. My God, I fell in love with the food in Fresno and the hardworking people.
And the third thing I fell in love with was rail because I could see the mass of supply chain moving on rail. I’m a spatial person. It’s the only way to do it. And we screw around and monkey around with all these other ways. But when you want to sand, dirt, food, wood, cars, you need rail. And you can really be impacted. Look what we can do with tiny homes. You can put five tiny homes on one rail car. It costs like five grand to move it all the way across the United States. If you drive a tiny home, it costs 25 grand to move it across the United States. No wonder it doesn’t work. Let rail move goods. That’s what I say.
And of course, the fourth thing you fell in love with had to be the ag meter. I mean, I’m just throwing it out there.
I mean, don’t tell everyone.
No, there are other states that are using this rail system, right?
I mean, rail is more popular in states that don’t have this crazy electric lockdown thing. I understand, you know, save the planet and less gas and all those things, but we just completely run off the track, if you know what I mean. It’s not just, by the way, rails and transportation. It’s not just that. It’s all of our resources in California are bleeding out. We’ve gutted them.
We’ve gutted our forest maintenance. We need to take care of our forests. We are supposed to be the stewards of these amazing national forests, and we are saving, what’s it called, something thistle or other, some brush? You know, yeah, and so you burn a whole town down. Great.
What about our water? You know, Trumpy Trump said, hey, we need to do two things. We want voter ID, and we want to turn the water back on. Okay, maybe turning the water back on isn’t the simplest thing, but he’s not wrong. What do we need to do to get enough water into the cities and into the forest and into the dry brush areas so that we don’t have a repeat of what’s just happened? These are old problems. They’re three decades old. So, what do we do to change that? So that’s my point.
I just interviewed Steve Hilton, and he said the same thing. This is an easy fix if we jump on it and do the right thing. This is a man-made problem. Man-made issues can fix this.
Well, you got to have real meaningful solutions. So, one of the meaningful solutions, in my opinion, is to create better supply chain in California by supporting the rail industry, supporting the unions that help the rail industry, supporting the individual short line that help the rail industry, everything you can possibly do to have better supply chain, and keep spending the money on our infrastructure on rail. I think it’s very important to have an attention on that. The other thing that we need to do in California, which we are not doing, is we need to make it a business-friendly environment.
If I were running, for example, for governor, I would focus on my lieutenant governor. I would pick the best lieutenant governor, and I would run as a team. At the end of the day, you are only as good as your governor if you’re lieutenant governor, and can you even name our lieutenant governor?
No.
We haven’t had a good lieutenant governor in three decades, and that’s the person that brings business into our state. The whole upper echelon of California needs to be completely revamped. We got to get rid of all of it, and we have to put people in place that are real doers. I don’t know if Steve Hilton’s the guy. He’s going to give it his best shot. God bless him, but it’s really about having a solid cabinet. It’s about the 3,000 people that you hire. You have to have a good history of hiring people and aligning yourself with people that are real doers and mobilizers.
We need a great insurance commissioner, Nick. We need an insurance commissioner. What are we doing? We have no insurance, and they’re not coming back anytime soon. The 17% hike with State Farm, that’s been in the works forever because, guess why? We didn’t cut our brush. We never gave insurance companies brush clearance records, so they left two years before the fires. Smartly, they left. They’re not dumb. They knew. We just didn’t know. The citizens didn’t know. California Fair Plan, poor guys, broke, small company, had a takeover. They’re not equipped. They don’t have enough people. They don’t have enough money, and everyone’s upset with California Fair Plan. At least they stepped in. It wasn’t a very big company to begin with. It wasn’t supposed to be California’s insurance plan. It was supposed to be a safety net. Anyway.
You were involved with the fires in the Palisade. I know you were very fortunate, thank God, that a lot of your houses were not burned. Do you think a lot of people maybe woke up and said, California’s in trouble. We need a change because what we’re doing is not working. Do you think some of those people have figured out that we got to do something different?
I think if there was ever a moment that California could flip, it’s now. If that’s what you’re asking me, I think it’s now. I definitely think the jig is up. The rubber has hit the road. Everybody can see the emperor has no clothes. You can say whatever you want, but we can clearly see that we got screwed over. If you don’t see that, you’re living under a rock. For goodness sakes, lift the rock. Get out from underneath it. This current situation is fixable.
You know what I’m going to tell you? In the 40s, when California really became popular and people started to move here, 20s were great and whatever, but in the 40s, it became the place to live. Nothing has changed. We’re in the same location. We have the same mountains. We have the same ocean breeze. The temperature is basically the same. It’s still California. We have beautiful forests. We live the life of Riley. The only thing that’s screwed up is the people who run it. It’s just the management. Get rid of the people that are running it, and we can go back to being the real California.
I 100% agree. We need a California makeover, and you’re doing that. You need a billionaire makeover. You could do that.
I want all new people. I just want all different people. It’s not Democrat, Republican. I just want new people because I think that they’re all stuck, and they need new perspective. We have to bring in people that want to do radical things.
There’s some money scam going somewhere. All I know is that the bridge in San Francisco, $2 million a day it makes. Where’s that money go to? Where’s the lottery money go to?
Think about that. You could be on the cabinet with me. What position do you want, Nikki? You could come and run California with me.
Seriously, where’s the lottery money? It was supposed to go to schools. The schools don’t get a dime of the lottery money.
The lottery is the craziest thing. I did a lottery meeting once, and the guy didn’t come on. It was on Zoom, and he had a blacked-out face, and he had a voice box. There you go. The lottery. Yeah, the California lottery. What is the California lottery?
Where does that money go? Where does that go? That’s a great question. There’s so much money. We need a DOGE. California needs a DOGE with everything from A to Z, and start over with it.
We could get DOGE. Don’t you think Elon, since he’s taking a little breaky break, could come over here?
I mean, seriously, we need a complete makeover.
How do we lose Tesla? I mean, I like my Tesla. I don’t understand why everybody’s all down on Tesla because somebody was looking in the underwear drawer.
Yeah, I think the other problem is, there’re so many people in California who have no idea where food actually comes from. They just go to a grocery store and figure, oh, that’s where it comes from.They have no idea. They don’t drive through the Central Valley. They don’t go on the Central Coast.
Well, the environmentalist thing has just gone, a good idea gone bad. I mean, I do think it’s very interesting how NGOs and groups that are do-gooders’ kind of go unchecked for a long enough period of time. Even though their intentions might have been benevolent when they started, they obviously changed.
They’re obviously corrupted and enticed by bad things, and we have got to try to get in front of that. I think that, look, there’s a couple of things that are easy to do, and there’s other things that are just very difficult. One of them is for, I think, for Californians to join together, Democrats and Republicans, farmers and tech people, all of us to join together and say, look at our beautiful resources, and can we just at least agree that we have wasted them? That has to stop. We have to agree. We have to agree to want change, and I think it’s important to agree to want change as a group. Not be afraid of the backlash, because there isn’t backlash.
Leaving California, there’s been nothing but an exodus of all of our money. Anybody who can go, goes. I just can’t leave. It’s not my option, but it’s been frustrating enough. Boy, I’ll tell you, there’s been a few times I’ve been like, what would that look like? I just can’t do it. I’m going to die hard. I’m going to try to fix it on my dying day, on my dying bed while I still be trying to help California.
I’m with you. I’m not leaving either. I’m going to try to fix it as well. We’re going to get the right people in. It has to be a complete change.
Well, hopefully California is waking up. Look, if Kamala Harris went, we can’t be afraid of that. Let me just say this. If she runs and she wins, shame on us. That’s what I have to say. We have to stop the bleeding. It’s not enough. Also, we need voter ID. We have to have voter ID. If we don’t have voter ID, then we lose control of what’s an honest election. People don’t want to say that out loud. They don’t want to be election deniers. They have all these things they don’t want to say. It’s not about that. We have to believe in our elections. That’s what it’s about. You have to build confidence. In other words, trust, but verify. Trust, but verify. By the way, this is the rule of any business practice. If you think that voting can’t be hacked or cheated upon, think twice. It can absolutely. That’s why you trust, but verify. You must actually card people. You card them to go into a bar. You’re not going to card them to vote. I mean, come on.
No, we got to bring common sense back in. There’s no doubt about it. We’ve lost common sense. We’re living in a twilight zone, and we can’t live in a twilight zone any longer. It has to change.
I agree with you, Nicky. Well, I want to keep doing this with you. I want to make change, and I want to start with Central Valley, and I want to start with the farmers, because the farmers feed everybody, and they have a lot of power. They have a lot of power. They need to harness their power. There are 88,000 small farmers in California that have so much power, and we need to support them. Farm dues for the Farm Bureau needs to be free for small farmers. It needs to be free for small farmers. It needs to be subsidized by Big Act. Small farmers should not be paying dues to the Farm Bureau. It should be free. We should support that. That way, all of them can be members. There should be a Yellow Pages. Bring back the Yellow Pages. There should be a way to reach small farmers. It should be through the Farm Bureau. Every single small farmer under 200 acres should be registered with the Farm Bureau so that we can call them up and buy their stuff, and then someone should make a website. I could do that. I’d make a website for the Farm Bureau. Here are the 88,000 farmers. Please meet the farmer and have their websites up there and pay for that. That’s something that California could work on, and I would work on if I was in the lead seat. I would make sure every single farmer could be reached, and I would make sure that their stuff could be moved.
We also need to lighten up on farm stands. We need to lighten up on farmers markets. We need to make those things available to operate. We have to pull ag and all of these county supervisor people that show up and say, shame on you, you’re selling goat cheese out and have them fight crime. Giving a farm stand a hard time about selling goat’s milk and goat cheese? Are you kidding me? Is that really a thing? If someone wants to buy goat’s milk or goat cheese off of a farm stand, let them.
Elaine Collati is on fire today. 559 Rail. She’s “The Lipstick Farmer”. Thanks for joining us today. You always get me fired up after I talk with you. We got to keep it going.
Give one to the goats. Yay, goat cheese.
You are the GOAT, the greatest of all time, so keep up the great work. Elaine, thank you so much. We’ll do this again more and more. Elaine, thank you so much for joining me. That was Elaine Collati, the lipstick farmer talking to 559 Rail.
I’m Nick Papagni, The Ag Meter” for AgNet West.