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KEY POINTS
The race for Iowa agriculture secretary focuses on clean water and farm-related pollution.
Iowa author and clean water activist Chris Jones is running as a Democrat.
Industrial agriculture interests mount an early attack.
Three years ago Chris Jones was a decorated research engineer at the University of Iowa, where he directed Iowa’s network of stream pollution monitors and published details about state water quality in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Secure in his academic perch in 110-year-0ld Trowbridge Hall, Jones also contributed to his university-sponsored blog, where he prepared aggressive, masterfully written, and widely read reports that identified agriculture as the primary source of the state’s calamitous water pollution.
In a nation increasingly averse to truth-telling, Jones was well aware that he was poking the biggest bear in Iowa – the state’s $44.8 billion-a-year industrial farm sector. Not only that, in the spring of 2023 he was preparing to publish “The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality,” a much-anticipated collection of those blog posts.
What happened next has the makings of a great podcast series or a Netflix drama. Upset by his fact-based reporting, powerful legislative allies of Iowa’s farm sector strong-armed the university to kill Jones’s blog and push him out of his academic post. They then took aim at eliminating funding for the stream monitoring network, one of the country’s best.
The media attention that followed Jones’s sacking helped “The Swine Republic” launch with strong sales, attract a number of major literary awards, and prompt an avalanche of speaking invitations in and outside Iowa. By June 2024, when he became president of Driftless Water Defenders, a feisty new nonprofit group focused on protecting the waters of northeast Iowa, Jones had surged to state and national prominence as an activist challenging the hazardous production practices of industrialized crop and livestock production and called on agriculture to be much more responsible in managing its mammoth tide of chemical and biological waste.
Decision to Run
On January 15, 2026, in the latest episode of this story of Heartland moxie and commitment, Jones threw down the ultimate marker of his hostility to the treacherous way crops and animals are raised in Iowa. He launched a longshot political campaign as a Democrat to serve as Iowa’s 18th agriculture secretary, one of seven statewide executive officers elected by Iowa’s citizens. His message is two-fold: hold agriculture accountable for its colossal contamination, and adjust farming’s economic incentives so that production is environmentally safer more profitable crop and livestock production practices for farmers.
“On the one hand, our citizens aren’t getting the environmental outcomes that they want,” Jones said in an interview. “On the other hand, farmers aren’t getting the economic outcomes that they want. Because of tariffs, they’re getting bailed out by the Trump administration.
“So why do we continue with this production model? The reason we’re doing it is because the big corporate agribusiness entities are getting the outcomes that they want. The Cargills of the world, Syngenta, Koch Industries, Corteva. These companies sell the inputs for agriculture and buy the commodities. Essentially, we have these companies coming into Iowa and extracting the wealth from this fertile landscape. We’re left with the pollution. It’s time to change that.”
Though critiques of agriculture like the one raised by Jones are not especially new in Iowa or the nation, they have never been expressed so loudly or directly in a campaign for the state’s top farm official. Though there’s no polling yet, his chances appear to be a political reach. Merely running as a Democrat in deep red Iowa makes his chance of election difficult. The last Democrat to win the office was 19 years ago, and only four other Democrats have been elected since the agriculture secretary position was established in 1923.
Jitters For Big Ag
Still, whatever happens in Jones’s campaign – he must first defeat Wade Dooley, an Iowa farmer, in the early June primary – it is already producing a significant consequence in the public interest. Iowa’s water pollution and its link to the state’s rising incidence of cancer is now a top-tier political issue in one of the nation’s important farm states.
The Iowa farm sector is so nervous about Jones’s message that two months before Jones launched his campaign, Mike Naig, a Republican running for a third term as state agriculture secretary, attacked Jones at a conservative club meeting in Urbandale. “You’ve got somebody that is a, well, he’s been prolific in his writing about agriculture,” Naig said in a report by The Gazette in Cedar Rapids. “He’s not a fan of it. In fact, I think you could say he hates ag. He hates farmers.”
Jones responds that he respects farmers and his aim is to protect their health, the health of their families, and the well-being of Iowa’s small farm communities and rural counties, many of which are losing jobs and population. But in entering such a prominent race, Jones says he is prepared for such low and ugly reactions to a campaign that he intends to pursue with clear ideas, proven facts, high-minded principles of conduct, and a relatable, down-to-earth approach.
“I think there’s a jail break about to happen here in Iowa over water quality,” he said. “Last year Des Moines rationed water for two months because there was so much nitrate from agriculture in their water. We have lakes in Iowa that are unusable in summer, year after year, because of algae blooms. A lot of them are constructed lakes that taxpayers paid for, and state parks were built around them, and they’re disgusting. Things are worse now than they’ve ever been. So where’s the accountability here?”
Jones, who is 65 years old and earned a Ph.D. in chemistry, was raised in Ankeny, then a small town north of Des Moines. He’s a scientist by training and an intellectual who can summon at will a deep reservoir of facts, figures, and historical context about the development of Iowa agriculture and where it strayed down the perilous path of corporate consolidation, toxic chemical use, and concentrated livestock operations that generate 110 billion pounds of water-polluting manure annually.
Everyman Campaign
In August, as he began seriously considering entering the race, Jones published “A Progressive Platform For Iowa Food and Agriculture.” It is a cogent array of reforms – establishing regulations on farm-related discharges to water, giving local governments zoning authority to oversee big animal feeding operations, developing a plan to reduce corn production and the more than 11 billion pounds of commercial fertilizer used to grow it – that now serves as the platform of his campaign.
Jones doesn’t look the part of a highbrow academic. Big and bulky, like a Midwest football lineman, he dresses for public appearances in casual outdoor garb appropriate for his favorite pastime – fishing the rivers and streams of northeast Iowa. He bolsters his regular guy image by traveling to campaign appearances in his Ford F-150, and sleeps inside the truck’s 1985 Jayco sliding camper.
“We’re taking this to campaign stops,” he said. “The press can come in. There’s a little kitchen table thing in there, and we can do interviews there. We can camp to save money and not have to pay for hotels,” he said. “The camper has this Everyman quality, right? So that’s what we’re trying to promote here. This is a campaign for every man and every woman, and not for agribusiness.”
At this stage Jones also is gaining more comfort with the oratorical skills of language, humor, and detail that will make his public appearances must-attend events. In an appearance last year at the Harkin Institute in Des Moines, for instance, Jones needled the “stupid, moronic rhetoric” of the Iowa Farm Bureau and other Big Ag groups who contend Iowa feeds the world. “We don’t even feed Polk County,” he said.
Such digs are essential in a campaign that calls for restraining pollution, new ways of doing business, and safer production practices. Though riveting to some, Jone’s message is as yet pretty sophisticated for a lay audience, and alarming to some farmers. One grower stormed out of a recent campaign stop in Pomeroy, offended by Jones’s presence. Just as he has accomplished in his writing, Jones will no doubt get better at translating his pointed critique into a more populist framework.
That, of course, is what Iowa’s agriculture sector is counting on – painting Jones as a leftist elitist who’s never held elective office and can’t be trusted with overseeing a farm industry second only to California in annual cash receipts, second only to Texas in the number farmers, and home base for some of the biggest corporations in U.S. agriculture.
A Nationally Significant Campaign In The Making
If Jones wins the June primary, agricultural politics in Iowa will get very interesting and nationally important. The contest between Jones and Naig would be the most significant campaign for an elected agriculture position in the U.S. since Jim Hightower won the race for Texas agriculture commissioner in 1982.
Hightower, a gifted Texas-born orator and skilled researcher who spent time on Capitol Hill, described himself during the campaign as a “grassroots populist” running against the “powers that be.” He won with 60 percent of the vote by focusing his platform on protecting consumers and empowering small farmers against corporate agribusiness.
More than 40 years later, Jones’s platform is equally ambitious. In taking the biggest step possible in this state (or any other, but especially Iowa) to leap from the merely notable to the realm of the renowned, he is advocating a new way of conducting farming in Iowa. It’s the equivalent of a brain and heart transplant for American agriculture. And it couldn’t come at a more opportune time.
The state has documented more than 7,000 private water wells contaminated with nitrate, a byproduct of commercial fertilizer and manure. Most state residents consume measurable levels of nitrate in their drinking water, according to University of Iowa data.
The fouling of the Iowa waterways by agriculture poses a direct threat to human health. Peer-reviewed studies have found long-term exposure to nitrate in drinking water is linked to uterine, rectal, bladder, and ovarian cancers in women. The Iowa Cancer Registry has found Iowa was the only state with a significant increase in cancer from 2015 to 2019, and has the second-highest overall cancer incidence of all 50 states.
“People want the truth, right?” Jones said. “There’s so much propaganda associated with this topic. We’re just immersed in crap from the agriculture industry here. It’s difficult for people to know what’s true.
“I’m n0t doing this so I can see some incremental change here in Iowa. I’m doing it because I want to see us transition to something different and better. I see that it’s going to take some courageous political leadership to shove this giant in a different direction.”