BUXTON (AP) - On a dare, Marcia Hoplin scrunches onto the metal toolbox that forms a narrow side panel atop her grandpa's 1946 Case tractor.

"Tighter now," she said.

It's a tighter fit now than when she was 4, when nothing appealed more than riding shotgun on the old three-wheeler, trading farm wisdom and wisecracks with her grandfather.

She now is 49 and rides in the scoop pilot seat when she fires up the venerable workhorse, still functional and right for the odd task at the farm Hoplin operates a few miles southwest of Buxton.

"Nowadays, they'd have a fit if they saw a kid sitting there," she said of the toolbox. "Back then, it's what I loved to do."

She was her grandfather's helper, ever present and ever eager, and she grew to be her father's farming partner, taking the lead when Paul Hoplin fell sick with cancer. When he died in 1996, she farmed on by herself.

"It was harvest time," she said. "I had a crop to get off. And it helped to be working. It eased the pain a bit."

Of the more than 30,600 farm operators in North Dakota counted in the most recent USDA Census of Agriculture in 2002, about 2,000 were female. Most were women older than 65 and living elsewhere who had their land in the Conservation Reserve Program, said to Earl Stabenow of the National Agriculture Statistics Service office in Fargo.

The census found just 233 women under 55 who were on-farm operators. "We're seeing more women who are sole operators, but it's still not common," Stabenow said. "I'd say it's very unusual."

Marcia Hoplin is a woman who farms - planting, cultivating, harvesting, marketing, repairing, borrowing, spending, deciding. She acknowledges the rarity of it.

But never does it enter her head that she is a "woman farmer," more special or less than the men who farm all around her.

"I know other women who are farming - widows and women with sons," she said. "But another woman, never married, farming on her own - I don't know any.

"I don't expect anything more from anyone than a man does," Hoplin said. "I don't go into the hardware store and say. 'I'm a woman. Can you do this for me?' I'm a farmer."

It's a small farm by Red River Valley standards, about 1,000 acres planted to wheat and beans. But the farmstead sprawls like a small, nicely landscaped rural subdivision, lush with ash and birch trees and beds of geraniums, still flashing red in mid-October.

Emmanuel Olson, Hoplin's great-grandfather, bought the land from the railroad, put up the barn in 1910 and built a house two years later. Her parents added a second house in 1958, designing it to accommodate Hoplin's mother, Muriel, 78, who was stricken with polio as a young woman.

Today, using a golf cart modified by her daughter, Muriel Hoplin tends the garden and the flower beds. With a specially designed riding mower, she cuts the grass.

"I couldn't do what I do without her help," Marcia Hoplin said.

She is lean, farm-fit and weathered by harvest wind and sun. A pair of pliers hangs from a leather holster slung from her jeans, and she moves with the deliberate manner of someone who has just completed a difficult task but is eager to get to the next.

Next on her list this day is outfitting her cavernous new machine shop. With its 18.5-foot sidewalls and 28-foot door, it's big enough to handle all her machinery.

"It's been a dream since I was a little kid," she said. "I always liked to tinker, but I got tired of lying on cardboard in the snow and cold, tinkering."

Her father had 5,400 laying hens. When he quit the egg business, that building was converted to a shop, "and with the heat, I thought I was on cloud nine," Hoplin said. "But I couldn't get anything in there - the ceiling too low - except a pickup or car.

"Now that I'm about to turn 50, I decided it was time to get it done," she said. "I wanted some time to enjoy it."