In Remote Modoc County, Women Form ‘Backbone’ of Agriculture

Aug 24, 2026

By Michael Hsu

Ary West just wants to farm and market her produce. But, as one of only 8,600 residents of far-flung Modoc County in California’s northeastern corner, she finds herself producing “everything” to help feed the scattered communities across the region.

In addition to growing fruits and vegetables in her garden and orchard at Trouble Valley Farm, West also sells chicken eggs, pasture-raised pork and a variety of baked goods.

“I don’t necessarily want to sell everything, but I’ve slowly picked up items that nobody else is offering because I’m trying to round out the farmers market and the food hub,” West said.

“The second I find someone else who will make bread, I will stop making bread!” she added with a laugh. “I really want to grow produce and I just kind of got stuck doing absolutely everything right now.”

In Modoc, the general task of “doing absolutely everything” quite often falls to women – even though they comprise about 51% of the population. That includes supporting agriculture, the primary economic engine of the region’s private sector.

“You really can’t talk about agriculture in Modoc County, specifically, without talking about women,” West said.

On top of operating her own farm business, West also oversees Modoc Harvest, a program under local nonprofit T.E.A.C.H., Inc. Originally created to administer the farmers market and advocate for stronger food systems in the area, Modoc Harvest now encompasses a range of food access and nutrition education programs.

Source : ucanr.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids