Inside a climate-controlled shipping container, rows of fresh lettuce grow under LED lights. For Marcus Carpenter ’00, the crop represents more than a novel way to grow food. He sees it as part of a larger effort to solve a problem he believes the American food system has overlooked.
“There’s food that’s rotting in the field while we have families who don’t have enough to eat,” he says.
It’s a contradiction Carpenter can’t shake. The former Wisconsin football player and founder of the Minnesota-based agricultural infrastructure company Route 1 has spent the last several years asking a simple question: If farmers are growing enough food, why are so many families struggling to access it?
For Carpenter, the answer is building the systems that connect farms, businesses, and communities. “If you look at America, we grow three times the amount of food that we need. It’s not a food production problem, it’s a ‘how do we get the food to the people?’ problem.”
He launched Route 1 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the company’s roots stretch back much further. Nearly a century earlier, Carpenter’s great-grandmother acquired 20 acres of farmland in northeast Arkansas. Over time, she and Carpenter’s great-grandfather expanded the farm to 180 acres, creating a family legacy that still shapes his work today.
“From a very early age, I understood what it was like to get your hands in the dirt and understand where your food comes from,” Carpenter says. “It’s really about connecting the soul and connecting your family to the earth.”
Those lessons stayed with him through his time at UW–Madison and later in business. Today, Route 1 focuses on supporting what Carpenter calls “emerging farmers.” In Minnesota, there are roughly 11,000 of them, many from underserved communities. These farmers operate on 30 acres or less while balancing full-time jobs, growing produce often sold directly to consumers through farmers’ markets and local grocery stores.
According to Route 1, many emerging farmers lack access to the infrastructure needed to move their produce into local communities before it spoils. The company estimates each of these farmer leaves between 2,000 and 5,000 pounds of food in the field each year because of those infrastructure gaps. Across Minnesota, that could mean tens of millions of pounds of fresh produce never reaching consumers.
To help bridge that gap, Route 1 is building agricultural and conservation microcampuses that provide shared refrigeration, storage, and transportation connections. The hubs allow multiple farmers to bring their produce to one location before connecting with larger distribution networks.
But Carpenter says infrastructure is only part of the solution. Through its Emerging Farmers Institute and Seeds to Success Youth Academy, Route 1 helps farmers build stronger businesses while introducing young people to opportunities in agriculture, technology, and entrepreneurship.
After successfully piloting its first microcampus, Route 1 is expanding the model with plans for additional locations. Carpenter envisions a future where farmers and entrepreneurs can use the company’s resources and support to build similar operations in their own communities.
The farm his great-grandparents built nearly a century ago helped shape the opportunities he has today. Through Route 1, Carpenter hopes to help others create that same kind of legacy.
