How I Reimagined the Farmers' Market to Deliver Local Food Everywhere

A fourth-generation Indiana farm kid, Nick Carter, 39, grew up expecting to join the family business. But by the time he was in high school in the late 1990s, he knew that was not a viable option.

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MARKET WAGON CEO: NICK CARTER

CATEGORY: FOOD & BEVERAGE

THREE-YEAR REVENUE GROWTH: 1,385%

The farm crisis of the previous decade had ravaged the Midwest, and while the Carters dodged foreclosure, the collapse of hog prices drove the family out of farming as a commercial enterprise. Instead, Nick went to college. Twenty years later, in 2017, he co-founded Market Wagon in Indianapolis to help small farms survive by selling directly to local consumers online. Now the Carters' hogs have returned, and the family farm is back in business-without the reliance on a contract from Smithfield Foods. Somewhere along the way, Nick just may have fixed one critical breakdown in the food supply chain.-AS TOLD TO ALI DONALDSON

Small family farms are dying for a number of reasons. One of the biggest is that they're not at a scale that allows you to make money growing soybeans and corn. I remember sitting in my high school guidance counselor's office, in a sleepy town in the middle of Indiana, and the message was: Get out of this hellhole. It's a terrible way of looking at the world.