Cattle rancher Rizpah Bellard remembers the discrimination her father, Cleveland faced when he first set out to become a farmer more than four decades ago.
Whether it was agribusiness professors at Fresno State arbitrarily lowering his grades, or USDA loan officers tearing up applications in his face, Bellard says her father was open with his children about the forms of institutional racism he encountered.
It’s a big reason why being one of the few Black farmers in Fresno County, and perhaps the only Black woman rancher in California, is so important to 30-year-old Bellard, who now runs her own company, Nova Farming.
“When Black people were going in for loans, you say, ‘Hey, I have all my paperwork.’ They say, ‘Okay, thank you.’ You leave. They turn around, they shred the paperwork,” explained Bellard. “If my dad had secured a loan that he had applied for in 1985, 1991… he would have secured land, and we could have been big-time ranchers right now. We just didn’t have that helping hand that the USDA and the Farm Service Agency was supposed to provide for all ranchers, but it only provided for white ranchers and farmers.”
According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, in 2022 there were 32,700 Black-owned or operated farms nationwide, accounting for less than 2% of the country’s more than 3.4 million producers. The number has fallen consistently since peaking in the early part of the 20th Century at more than 212,000. In Frenso County, there are just 9 Black owned farms.
At the same time, alternative farming methods like urban agriculture are growing across the country, including in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
Bellard grew up with her parents and two brothers in Guinda, a small, rural, majority white town about 60 miles northwest of Sacramento. Together, they ran a Black Angus cattle ranch. Her father, who grew up in the East Bay city of Richmond and was first mentored in ranching by a neighbor, learned about regenerative agriculture before there were even terms for it.
“We were always raising pigs, goats, sheep, cows, horses, chickens… We’d hunt, fish, camp, all that. We did everything outdoors,” recalled Bellard.
After graduating from Cornell University in 2015 with a public health degree, Bellard worked in anti-trafficking nonprofits in Oakland for a few years, before receiving her master’s degree in international studies with a concentration in Human Trafficking and Forced Labor. She returned to her family home in 2020, and her career in agriculture began.
Bellard runs Nova Farming with her father, Cleveland as vice-president. The business, among the few small ranches that operates its own supply chain from calves all the way to frozen beef in your freezer, raises crossbred Angus-Wagyu beef cows using sustainable farming methods. The father-daughter pair market primarily to schools, institutions, and other high-volume buyers, like Beardsley Unified School District in Bakersfield, and the Central California Food Bank.
Bellard is also sharing the success with other Black ranchers, too. They raise cattle to her grass-fed, small-pasture specifications, which she sells to fill out large deliveries.
“Now the way that I operate is a little bit different than most because I have people who are Black and brown ranchers that didn’t have opportunities for an end product as well. So they’re in their 60s or 70s – one of my ranchers he’s 82. They like ranching, they like running cattle, they just don’t have an end buyer,” said Bellard.
“So I’ve been pretty successful in that I have institutions that want to buy at my price. And then also because my dad knows the whole process… So it’s not just like, I’m this young rancher that came out of nowhere selling beef. I’m a second-generation rancher. I just have more opportunities than my dad had, but he has all the knowledge that any other rancher has. He just wasn’t given the opportunity.”
Nova Farming doesn’t just sell beef – it’s concerned with ag education as much as actual farming. Nova started off raising chickens at Ruby’s Valley Care Home, a mental health facility near Fresno.
“I was teaching mental health residents how to raise poultry for egg production. So we had about 20 hens, and then every week we would donate all the fresh eggs to the food bank to give to members of the community,” said Bellard.
Within a year she scaled up Nova significantly: purchasing a small flock of several different animals to help educate children, building out the cattle herd with her father, and ramping up the educational programs for the community. She developed an agriculture education curriculum tied to California science standards for each grade level.
“I pitched that to Fresno Unified School District, and I got picked up in 2024 or 2023 to teach ag as part of their career and technical education… So I was going out to all different schools with the animals, all different levels, all different student vulnerability levels, throughout Fresno Unified last school year. And I’m back on contract this school year.”
Bellard shares her knowledge on improved farming practices through agricultural consulting, classes, and workshops for local schools. Between all this work, she still makes time to run two independent living properties in Fresno offering stabilized housing for at-risk populations – she was even honored by the Independent Living Association of California for her quality operation.
Across her various educational and agricultural projects, feeding and nurturing others, care for her community at large seems to be the center of Bellard’s work. All that while dealing with the same challenges that all small ranchers in California face – a tough market, high transportation costs, and being edged out by growing corporate farms.
Beef prices also continue to climb, due to rising demand and low cattle supply thanks to recent droughts and wildfires. In response, President Trump has agreed to import more beef from Argentina, which has rankled ranchers in the US who say the move will further hurt their sales while doing little to reduce costs for consumers.
The president’s tariffs have also had an impact.
“Since the tariffs happened, we have shut down, limited, or just made it really expensive to move beef into the United States… there’s just not a lot of mom cows,” said Bellard, and what there is “is all going to large corporations.”
On a positive note, Bellard says she hasn’t had to deal with the kinds of discrimination her father faced. Whereas the older Bellard came up only a few decades removed from the Civil Rights movement and sharecropping, today Nova’s buyers “are around my same age. They grew up in neighborhoods with Black and brown and mixed type neighborhoods.”
She added, “It’s just been a couple of generations of change where people want to do good now, people want to help out now regardless of race.”
If anything, she says, her unique position has helped her business.
“It’s also interesting that I’m not really chasing too many opportunities, the opportunities are coming to me because it’s so novel what I’m doing, so people are asking me, can I buy something, how can I support you? What can I do?”
Still, as Fresno’s lone Black female rancher, Bellard says that identity matters because it shows others what is possible.
“Regardless of race, age, gender, I’m in the trenches just like everybody else in ag. I’m feeling the blows of tariffs, I’m feelin’ the blow of the shut down, I’m feeling the blows of the consumer not being able to afford my product… I’m an agriculturalist. I’m a rancher. I’m a farmer. I’m on the ground in the fields, in the weeds, in the mountains doing the work just like everybody else.”
She added, “I’m just like, well, being Black is important to recognize the fact that there’s nobody else like me.”
Chris Alam is a California Local News Fellow with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
