Brooks is a city in Red Lake County, Minnesota, United States.

[4] According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1.17 square miles (3.03 km2), all land.

The racial makeup of the city was 96.5% White, 0.7% Native American, 1.4% Asian, and 1.4% from two or more races.

Brooks was primarily a service town for the surrounding agricultural townships, and a creamery was established as the local dairying business developed on neighboring farms.

After the invention of the cream separator, family farms in adjoining townships of Polk and Red Lake counties switched from subsistence agriculture to a market economy and became a part of the dairy industry.

Local farmers would process the milk from their own cows by removing the butterfat or cream, which was hauled in cream cans to the cheese factory, while the skim milk or whey was fed to hogs raised on the same farm.

The Brooks Cheese Company continued in business until the late 1970s, at which point the decline of the family farm and the predominance of monoculture and industrial agriculture eliminated the mixed agriculture that formerly had predominated in the area of Brooks.

Although the local history of Red Lake County blames the National Farmers Organization for organizing farmers to cooperative actions in withholding milk shipments, the reality is that Brooks Cheese Company could not compete with the major industrial cheese manufacturers and the development of agribusiness which portended the demise of the family farm.