Alum Profile: The Scientist Farmer

November 3, 2025

By Kirstin Baird Rattini

According to the USDA, 50% of small farms don’t survive beyond their first five years and, of the survivors, only 25% make it to 15 years. As a senior farm business advisor with the nonprofit organization Kitchen Table Advisors, third-generation farmer Carine Hines (published as Carine Marshall) draws on her PMB training, lessons from running her own organic farm, and community connections to help socially disadvantaged small producers in Northern California not just survive, but thrive.

Growing up, Hines (BS '09 Genetics & Plant Biology, PhD '17 Plant Biology) spent summers at her grandmother’s dairy farm in southwest France, where she’d help with daily chores, including milking, and the prune harvest. “It was all-hands on deck,” she says.

Her father owned a native plant nursery in Watsonville, California, where she worked in the propagation department making plant cuttings. “That’s where I learned the skills and work ethic I now apply to my farm,” she says.

Three images: Carine Hines in a UC Berkeley lab, Carine holding a female cone of a Cycad, and two people on a plot of dirt

Left to right: Carine (Marshall) Hines working in Frank Harmon's lab at the Plant Gene Expression Center in 2014. Hines holding up the female cone of a Cycad while teaching a Comparative Plant Morphology Lab section in 2015. Hines and her partner Robert planting their first garden together in South Berkeley.

At UC Berkeley, she found not only her true love—her husband Robert, in a plant morphology course—but her passion for plant biology. She returned for her PhD under PMB adjunct associate professor Frank Harmon, a researcher at the Plant Gene Expression Center. “He encouraged me to go down rabbit holes and explore things I was excited about,” she says. She also was inspired by Sarah Hake, now an adjunct professor emerita, who, as a farmer scientist, was a great role model.

Hines and her husband started their organic Sun Tracker Farm in the Capay Valley in 2015. “Our goal is to use agriculture to build soil health to fight climate change and leave the planet better than when we started,” she says. In 2024, they sold around 72,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables, with the French Charentais melon their top seller.

The couple has a strong customer base at the Napa Farmers’ Market; she served as its vice president and a board of director for several years. “Sharing my farmer’s perspective on the board helped us to grow the market into this thriving enterprise that farmers can depend on for income and a community of support,” she says.

Meanwhile, when she’s not in the fields or at the farmers’ market, Hines has been providing one-on-one support to small farmers and ranchers in the Yolo, Sacramento, and Solano regions, through Kitchen Table Advisors. Over a minimum of three years, she helps small sustainable producers with the tools, resources, and relationships they need to maintain viable businesses. Alongside her clients, Carine focuses on collecting data and implementing systems so that they can make informed business decisions. “We meet them where they are,” she says. “Some might have a bookkeeping system, others just a shoebox of receipts.”

In her interactions with producers via Kitchen Table Advisors, Hines assists with crop planning, taking the long view of the growing season to pinpoint when produce must be planted in order to be ready to sell by the target market date. She helps compile harvest and sales logs to track productivity and profitability. Above all, she serves as a trusted sounding board. “I want to hear their good, bad, and ugly and what they need help with to find a solution,” she says.

One farmer client Hines advises is Ge Moua of Moua Farm in Elverta, CA. Moua grows certified organic fruits and vegetables, in particular crops that are used in Hmong cooking. In addition to business planning and bookkeeping, Hines helped Moua access recovery funds after her farm was hit hard by severe winds and flooding in the winter of 2023 and 2024. With Kitchen Table Advisors, Moua is now working with the Natural Resource Conservation Service to implement conservation practices, such as wind breaks, hedgerow plantings and high tunnels, that can help the farm be more resilient to climate change-induced natural disasters.

“I learned in my PhD not to be overwhelmed by failure, which is such a big part of science. It’s always a learning lesson,” Hines says. “There’s so much failure that happens in farming. We try to help farmers not let failure get them down but realize it’s a growth opportunity.”

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