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TIPTON, Iowa – Democrats filed into the Cedar County party headquarters late last month to hear Chris Jones, the Democratic candidate for state agriculture secretary, propose the most aggressive agenda for curbing pollution and human disease from the crop and livestock sectors ever uttered by a candidate running for a statewide office in Iowa.
In order to sharply reduce the billions of pounds of nutrients causing Iowa’s worst-in-the-nation water quality, and address the fastest-in-the-nation increase in cancer incidence, Jones wants to shrink acres devoted to growing Iowa’s corn and soybean crops, the country’s largest. A 65-year-old retired chemist, author, and water-quality activist who’s never campaigned for office, Jones also proposes to raise in pastures the millions of hogs and chicken, and thousands of cows and cattle now confined in huge, manure-producing industrial feeding operations.
The reason for both proposals is the nitrogen from billions of pounds of commercial fertilizer and manure that are spread on Iowa fields. In soil, nitrogen converts to nitrate, a carcinogen, that drains into surface and groundwater.
The other salient points of Jones’s plan? Diversify state harvests, like producing less-polluting oats, and devoting more acres to orchards. Jones wants to tax fertilizer applied in the fall, discouraging its use when it’s most likely to run off fields. Jones says Iowa needs to make it easier for young people to start farming and support smaller hog farms by reestablishing the network of small slaughterhouses. And he wants to establish a $10 million fund to encourage schools to buy fresh fruits and vegetables from state growers.
“We’ve got to do this,” said Jones. “It’s an existential problem for the state. We need to return some diversity to farming. We cannot get the water quality that we want. We cannot get the other environmental outcomes that we want when we only have two species of plants on 70 percent of our land.”
What Others Say
Though he has a more aggressive critique and plan of action, Jones is not alone in identifying Iowa’s $120 billion-a-year farm sector as a hazard to Iowa’s 3.2 million residents. With the exception of Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican running for U.S. Senate who barely scrapes the topic, every other candidate for statewide office, Republican and Democrat, is talking a lot about rising cancer incidence, and some of the solutions to Iowa’s wretched water quality. Both are linked by researchers to how farmers cultivate their crops and raise livestock and poultry. A number of down ballot candidates also are campaigning on ideas to move Iowa agriculture beyond cultivating two crops and raising more than 20 million hogs.
Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek tells audiences that he got into the race for U.S. Senate because his sister is being treated for breast cancer and his grandmother died of pancreatic cancer. “This is not the state that I know. This is not the state that I grew up in,” he
told a campaign rally in August. “We are basically dead last for every single economic metric, healthcare metric. We’ve got a water quality crisis, a cancer crisis. Iowans are ready for change.”
Candidates offer similar plans to respond to both.
Rob Sand, the state auditor who’s running as a Democrat for governor, insists his plan is the most comprehensive. Among other initiatives it calls for increasing public funding for voluntary pollution-prevention programs, expanding wetlands, and establishing a cabinet-level cancer task force.
Zach Lahn, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who made water quality and cancer central issues from the start of his campaign, appeared on CBS Face The Nation in October and offered a similar voluntary prescription. “We are focused on providing incentives to farmers, real incentives, to adopt different types of practices to allow them the ability to really change what they’re doing to stop these products from getting into these streams in the first place.”
And Mike Naig, the incumbent two-term Republican Iowa secretary of agriculture, acknowledges Iowa’s cancer incidence and poor water quality, but insists both are not the fault of farmers.
In June, as pollution and cancer emerged as major campaign issues, the Republican-led Legislature and Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds collaborated in establishing a $320 million fund for water quality. No surprise, among its provisions was more money for voluntary conservation – cover crops, edge-of-field buffers, wetlands, and grazing systems to reduce pollution. Also, the package included state support for the stream monitoring network that the Legislature has tried to kill for three years.
It’s important to note that since 2013 Iowa has overseen a Nutrient Reduction Strategy, largely based on the same voluntary measures to curb nitrate contamination advocated by Sand, Lahn, and Naig. It has been mostly ineffective.
“This is a situation where playing the blame game is not going to get us to where we need to go,” Naig, who once was a lobbyist for the Monsanto chemical company, told a farm group in September. “There have been some who are activists in their nature, have decided that they are just going to blame this all on farmers and unfortunately we know that this is more complex than just saying it’s one issue caused by one group of folks.”
Stepping Over Third Rails
Regardless of who wins among the candidates not named Jones, what’s happening in Iowa is significant. Iowa is the only state this year where one of its primary industries has come under such scrutiny. And only twice before, when federal price supports were debated during the 1930s Depression, and again in the 1980s when thousands of farms were foreclosed, has agriculture policy and practice risen to the top of campaign concerns in Iowa. What all but one major candidate is talking about in Iowa this year is tantamount to California candidates criticizing Silicon Valley, or Louisiana politicians going after offshore oil.
If, however, Chris Jones is elected agriculture secretary, the consequence could be extraordinary. His single-minded focus on agriculture’s responsibility for causing the terrible condition of water and human health proved a powerful and undeniable political influence in Iowa this year. His prescriptions for change, including regulations to stem nutrient runoff and to tax fertilizer, are more aggressive than any ever proposed by a statewide candidate.
If he becomes Iowa agriculture secretary Jones will have a bully pulpit for rallying citizens in and outside Iowa for more attention and funding to put much safer practices in place to produce food and fiber.
For those reasons and others, say even his supporters, Jones’s election appears a long shot. Almost one in five jobs in Iowa are connected to agriculture and farmers on Tik Tok say he won’t win their vote.
“He’s going to be branded as more regulation,” said David Lorenzen, a retired minister at the United Church of Christ in Tipton, who attended Jones’s meeting. “In Iowa regulation seems to be such a bad word that people don’t go beyond that. However, with this cancer thing, and we can’t swim at our state beaches. Maybe it’ll happen.”
Jones, however, is undeterred.
“I’d like to take some credit for what’s happening here now,” he told the small Tipton audience. “Having the Republican candidate for governor lead with this did affect things. Sand wasn’t talking much about it until Lahn won the primary. We’ve done our own polling. It shows 86 percent of the population wants some regulation of nitrate runoff. So there’s got to be other candidates that have similar data like that.
“The number one issue, period, is water quality. Having someone campaign on this and just talk honestly about it. There was this pent-up sort of frustration. No politician wanted to touch this.
“You talk about third rails. There’s third rails everywhere here. This whole thing is third rails. That’s one of the reasons we have the situation we have. The ag establishment has really been able to repress speech, right? And so people that work in the NGOs and work in the universities, they’re scared of touching this stuff because you know they fear that they’re going to lose their jobs or lose their funding or not get invited to meetings or whatever. I’m a candidate that has nothing to lose. You know, I’m retired. Or so I think.”
