North Minneapolis tattoo artist tries to be what remains rare in Minnesota: a Black farmer

Two pigs rummage around the wooden pigsty, one pressing a wet snout to the fence. Over in the tumbledown garden, white hens cluck and peck at feed.

This is not your typical north Minneapolis backyard. But it’s the newly fashioned home for the beginning farmer, 46-year-old Derek Ellis, who stares in wonder, marveling at his Berkshire pigs and what he’s accomplished in a short time.

“Met some guy [who sold me the pigs] at a Cracker Barrel down south,” said Ellis, a husband and a father of five who runs Minneapolis-based Good Day Farmstead. “They’ve got an appointment with a butcher in Brooten.”

Beyond the pen rests the season’s garden. During the season, tomatoes and peppers sprout. Auburn leaves wrap around the fence, transforming the backyard into an edenic glen north of Plymouth Avenue N.

Ellis is an urban farmer now. For two seasons, he has sold his ketchups, hot sauces and eggs at the Minneapolis Farmers Market. But he hopes for land in the country. He’s filled out a slew of applications for special grants from governmental and nonprofit groups. He’s trying to be what remains rare in Minnesota: a Black farmer.

According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture released earlier this year, of the 65,000 farms in Minnesota, fewer than 75 are run by Black producers.

“My goal would be to do livestock,” said Ellis, who has sought but never won a state grant to help him purchase farmland. “They say chickens are the gateway to livestock.”

The last few years have seen a flurry of state and federal programs designed to boost minority farmer numbers.

In July, the Biden administration took unprecedented action at the U.S. Department of Agriculture: It disbursed $2 billion to farmers discriminated against by past agency practices. The push to pay back aggrieved farmers, many who met closed doors at farm lending offices, traces roots to the New Deal. Throughout the 20th century, Black farmers received less federal aid compared to white ones.

Beginning in the 1980s, federal officials admitted to wrongdoing, spurring Black farmers to file class action lawsuits. The payments were authorized as part of 2022′s Inflation Reduction Act.

“We had to create an application that gave farmers and ranchers and landowners an ability to tell their story,” USDA Deputy Secretary Xochitl Torres Small said in an interview.

Still, few farmers receiving the $2 billion in grants live in Minnesota. Partly, experts say, few Minnesota farmers could document discrimination. But that doesn’t mean discrimination didn’t happen. In Washington, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., has called for support for minority growers in farm programs.

“The status quo puts us in a place of increasing concentration in agriculture,” Smith said last year at a meeting at the Good Acre, a food hub in Falcon Heights. “What specifically can we do [in farm policy] to make it work for more people?”

On the state side, the Legislature and Gov. Tim Walz similarly sought to open roads for farmers of color to land ownership by establishing a down payment assistance grant to help beginning farmers, particularly producers of color.

But this year, a farmer from Beltrami County, backed by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, sued to block the program on the basis that its eligibility requirements discriminated against the white plaintiff.

In response, the Minnesota Legislature changed the program’s eligibility, dropping priority for minorities and focusing, instead, on specialty crop farmers and lower-income growers.

Sen. Aric Putnam, DFL-St. Cloud, said the new language focuses on “market conditions,” but would “still, by and large, reach the same population we were trying to reach before.”

For Ellis, the journey to pigs, chickens, and homemade ketchup from his garden really began in 2011. That’s when he got sober and started buying food for his children.

“I was always wondering why I got some anxiety in the grocery store,” Ellis said. “I’d get into the store, and wonder, ‘Who buys all this” stuff?

But when he lived off Franklin Avenue, a neighbor kept a potted garden. She gave him a fresh tomato.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God. What is this? I definitely wanted to come up with a way” to grow this.

During the pandemic, when grocery stores lacked fresh food and meat-packing facilities shuttered, Ellis began paying closer attention to the often murky ties of the food system. When he lived in south Minneapolis, he noticed co-ops and grocery stores lined the avenues. But on the North Side, he saw fewer fresh food options.

After the police murder of George Floyd outside a corner store with little fresh food, global calls to address systemic inequalities included those in farming, and who benefits from the sustainable food system.

At night, Ellis, who’s run his own tattoo parlor in downtown Minneapolis for nearly 30 years, stayed up watching videos on farming. It started with a YouTube video on making apple cider vinegar.

“Then I went down this rabbit hole of watching videos from homesteaders,” Ellis said.

He watched documentaries, like “Food, Inc.,” and “Kiss the Ground,” films that perpetuated ideas around sustainable eating and humane food systems.

Soon, he had a backyard garden. He found free lumber at the Home Depot. He pounded in fence posts. He got some chickens. A couple of pigs, running afoul of city ordinances. He started making regular runs to the Tractor Supply store.

In late October, Ellis wore a baseball cap and black T-shirt while he shook out fresh mulch for his hens.

“They were chicks that were stuck under a broody hen,” Ellis said. “They’ll be laying in December.”

It’s unclear what the incoming presidential administration has in store for farmers. After concerns across production agriculture circles that President-elect Trump might name Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmentalist with a history of opposition to pesticides, to lead the USDA, there was seeming relief and support when Trump named his pick for USDA Secretary as Brooke Rollins, CEO of the America First Policy Institute. Rollins grew up on a farm in Texas.

There also remains widespread anxiety that Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on U.S. trading partners will result in retaliatory tariffs, similar to those that walloped Minnesota farmers during the first Trump administration.

But many of these programs wouldn’t impact a farmer such as Ellis, selling local food directly to customers in the Twin Cities. What could impact Ellis would be a winding down of USDA’s programatic attention on minority farmers. Some Trump surrogates, for instance, have sounded the death knell for diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Still, Ellis seems determined to keep chipping away at his dreams.

Over on the Traeger grill, Ellis is smoking three pork butts. He’ll share the meat at church.

“Someday,” he said, “that’ll be my own meat.”

The pigs seem unbothered, and the farmer shakes out more mulch, talking sweetly to the animals like an old pro.