Elaine Culotti’s 559 Rail initiative is reimagining America’s food supply chain by uniting farming and railroads to reduce waste, empower growers of all sizes and bring fresh, affordable food directly to underserved communities.
“The two greatest things in America are farming and railroad,” says Elaine Culotti.
The sustainable farmer, entrepreneur and “Undercover Billionaire” alum is on a mission to transform America’s crumbling rail infrastructure into a lifeline for the country’s farmers and food-insecure communities. Through her new initiative, 559 Rail, Culotti seeks to bring new life to abandoned rail depots, reimagining them as local food hubs that connect farmers directly to consumers while dramatically reducing supply chain waste.
The U.S. EPA estimates that 30% to 40% of the 2023 food supply was lost as waste, and Culotti believes the solution lies not in high-tech warehouses or centralized systems but in reactivating the infrastructure that once built the nation.
At the heart of the 559 farm train is a scalable, decentralized distribution model that moves fresh produce from both large and small farms more quickly, sustainably and equitably — cutting out middlemen, lowering costs and delivering nutrition where it’s needed most, Culotti says.
Now, with 559 Rail, she’s scaling that model across the country by repurposing rail depots into local food hubs, creating permanent farmers markets and empowering farmers to reach broader markets with less waste.
Culotti’s background as a successful real estate developer and luxury designer gives her a unique edge in building infrastructure that’s both visionary and practical. She’s long been an advocate for urban renewal, sustainable farming and local economies — and with 559 Rail, she’s bringing those threads together to fix how food moves in America.
On Discovery’s “Undercover Billionaire,” she built a business to revitalize underutilized rail infrastructure to support local agriculture, aiming to reduce food waste and improve supply chain efficiency.
Resources, Culotti says, are the key to making community-supported agriculture viable.
“The No. 1 problem with success is a lack of resources. And it struck me in farming that community-supported agriculture isn’t helping [in that situation] … It blows me away that there’s no way to transport it.”
Couple the lack of resources with a decline in the love for railroads, Culotti says, and it compounds the problem.
“I know the obvious reasons that are stated for the ‘ousting,’ if you will, of short line and rail transportation: It’s not the cleanest way to travel, it’s cumbersome, loud, dangerous … there are a million reasons, but very few are solidified as true. [Rather], the railway is the cleanest way to travel,” Culotti says. “One gallon of diesel will take one ton of merchandise across the U.S. What other avenue of travel does that?”
She began to unravel what it could look like to move pluots or other regional produce to areas where it’s not currently accessible. By selling solely at local farmers markets, where other farmers are selling the same products, Culotti says the market lacks demand. If, instead, the farmer can take that pluot from California to Iowa, for example, it creates a market for that item.
“The only thing that makes a market is competitiveness. If you are selling to yourself or a group of people who are doing the same thing, you have no market. By definition, you have to have a competitive market.
“This was my hypothesis, and I came up with a crazy idea to put the whole darn thing on rail, just make a festival on rail filled with food and music and go all the way through the United States and deliver food.”
Empowering farmers, feeding communities
Beyond logistics, 559 Rail is about creating direct connections between farms and families, rural growers and urban tables, while giving farmers of all sizes a fairer shot at reaching broader markets.
To include large and small farms in the plan, Culotti says her goal is to have large ag pay for it on a buddy program to include smaller farms.
“Every dollar that we save large ag in their long haul goes into small farming to get a ride-along.”
Other metrics Culotti considered were ways to get better refrigeration on rail — better reefer cars, better support for the food, better loading times, better transit times and quicker delivery specialty trains.
Still, you can’t put all the pressure on the railroads, packers and the farmers, Culotti says.
“You have to put the pressure on legislation,” she says. “You have to put the pressure on the Department of Transportation, on the Federal Railroad Administration, on the property agriculture on USDA; you have to put the pressure on the people that are supposed to do their job, which is to feed America and deliver that food safely, quickly and not for very much money.”
You can count on the delivery system of rail, Culotti says, “and we need to pave the way for that, or lay the track for that. We need to say these are food depots across the United States, and we need to lift regulations on small farming almost completely, and not just at a farm stand.”
From farm to rail to consumer
As the U.S. grapples with food insecurity, rising waste and broken supply chains, Culotti’s model offers a path forward, one that reconnects the power of farming and rail to serve both people and the planet.
“I came up with 559 because in Fresno that’s their area code,” Culotti says. “So the 559 is Central Valley — it’s America’s food basket. I mean, 80% of produce, nuts, stone fruit, you name it, come out of that region.”
“There are 8,000 unused rail sightings across the United States,” she adds. “We call them ‘resting rail’ and they’re everywhere. The majority of those sightings are located in underprivileged communities with food sovereignty problems and other problems, mostly supply chain, where the community is not big enough to have a train stop, even though the community was built around the train stop some 100-plus years ago.
“My goal is to see all of those depots open for food and trade one day [in my beautiful world],” Culotti continues. “Meanwhile, we’ve picked a few that we think are ideally located and will serve the community and provide jobs in the community and provide a path for the railroad that gets them somewhere else.”
The key, she says, is to create such a quality model that everyone wants to see it through.
“There’s a long-term regulated approval process for piloting the model because you have to be approved by the FRA, the Department of Transportation, USDA, etc.,” Culotti says. “It’s a legislative approval nightmare, and so first prove the model, first make the idea so good that everybody wants to see it through, and do that by supporting communities that really need it, because they will help support you to get it.”
Culotti is especially interested in the trade opportunities where the train can pick up food from other states.
“We feel San Antonio has been left out of the conversation,” she says. “We are very interested in Nashville and all around Tennessee. We are interested in the heartland, because the heartland, while there’s lots of farming, it’s very seasonal, and we can do trade. We love Florida produce, but Florida produce needs to be in Nashville too. So we like the trade model, where we can pick up in other states.”
The original pilot starts in Fresno, Culotti says, because it’s her birthplace.
“The 559 was born in Fresno, so our goal is to go from Fresno to Frisco, Texas,” she says. “Why? Because Frisco is the hub of Texas entrepreneurialism and community-supported everything. Frisco is a very wealthy community in Texas: it supports new business ideas like no one else in the United States, and they have for a long time. They have one of the best museums for trains in the country. They have local trains running through the middle of Fresco, the BNSF. They have a rail yard in the middle of their downtown — so they are cohesive to rail in an urban community, and in a city, this is important. So we feel that going to Frisco shakes up Texas, and when Texas gets on board for rail and farming, you need Texas.”
Then, Culotti has sights set on communities that are important to move food out of.
“For example, Walla Walla, Wash.,” she says. “There are all kinds of communities where certain things are grown that need a way out that’s affordable because they’re far away like the Idaho potato. Some items can’t go on the rail because of the rattle and shaking, like a berry. And so we’re working on a truck system that doesn’t rattle. We have solar cooling, because then you don’t have the smell of diesel in anything. We have battery bladders. We have a fold up and out so that when we’re behind the blue flag, which is a rail term for being out of the way of traffic, you can get on the train for shopping.
“And you can take this model and you can expand the model. You could have a John Deere train; you could have a tech train; you could have an iPhone train. It doesn’t matter. You need to have a supply chain in small communities that have otherwise been forgotten,” Culotti says.
The goal is set for 2026, Culotti says: “We will be alive for the 250th birthday of America, representing farming on the railroad on Freedom Train 2.0.”
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