Alexandra Macedo

Elected in 2024 to the California State Assembly at age 30, Alexandra Macedo is the youngest Republican Assemblywoman in her state’s history. Belying her youthful appearance, Macedo is working to carry forward a long-standing agricultural legacy—with a Portuguese heritage from the Azores, she is the fourth generation involved in her family’s livestock market and also farms almonds and citrus on her late grandfather’s land. In an August 2025 interview on the State of Gold Podcast, she explained, “I grew up at the livestock market, loving agriculture, loving what my family did and how rooted we were in the [San Joaquin] Valley. And if I wasn’t [at the livestock market], I was on my grandfather’s dairy…. I always just had a passion for ag, and I knew it was in my veins.”

Macedo explained to podcast host Jon Slavet the journey that took her to the State Assembly. After earning an undergraduate degree in Business Law, she joined her civil engineer mother at Macedo Engineering & Consulting, where she quickly learned that in California, regulations often make permitting and compliance “dang near impossible.” When she found that questions tended to be met with “Because I said so,” she obtained a law degree and founded Macedo Environmental Consulting to offer assistance with environmental compliance. Hitting the same “Because I said so” wall, she then ran for and was elected to public office on a platform of preserving and strengthening California agriculture.

In a state Assembly dominated by a Democratic supermajority, Macedo hit the ground running, announcing, “We’re no longer on defense in agriculture. We’re on offense.” Commenting on some of the critical challenges facing farmers, Macedo cites:

• Water instability: “The state of California loves to create man-made droughts.” She is willing to educate legislators representing urban areas about water, noting that “discussions about clean drinking water can open the door for conversations about rural water issues.”
• Chronic uncertainty about government actions: “The critical part of your business is being able to plan. We can’t plan.”
• Regulation run amok: “A recent study [showed] that the average cost of compliance every year…is $1,600 per acre.”
• Falling margins: “Ag buys everything retail and sells everything wholesale.”

In the interview, Macedo made the essential and often ignored point that “1% of the population is feeding 100% of the population.” She asked,

“Why do we continue to make their lives harder? We should be thanking them and showing them appreciation, and instead, what do we give them? More regulation, more fines, more fees, more bills to pay, and more hands in the cookie jar.”

In addition to being appreciative of Macedo’s willingness to go to bat for farmers, we notice that she seems equally passionate about government transparency, a cause near and dear to us at Solari. The first piece of legislation Macedo introduced was a bill requiring the Newsom Administration to conduct cost analyses of regulations imposed on the driving public so as to provide greater transparency about gas taxes and gas price hikes: “We must shine a light on the government decisions that increase our cost of living and rob us of financial stability.”