Carrie Teiken serves as associate director of small farms, where she leads statewide efforts to strengthen extension services, applied research, and policy support for California's small and historically underserved farmers. She has worked with small-scale farmers for 20 years, advancing local food systems through interdisciplinary collaboration.

Carrie spent the past decade as a foreign service agriculture officer with USAID, managing agriculture and food security programs as the economic growth deputy office director and agricultural team lead in Tanzania, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is an alumna of the University of California, Davis where she received master's degrees in plant pathology and international agricultural development and conducted research on citrus greening (Huanglongbing) and integrated pest management. 

Carrie's previous experience includes roles with the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service in California, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service in Belgium, and the Ecology Center in Berkeley. She also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana and spent her summers working on a small vegetable farm while earning her bachelor's degree in anthropology and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.