There are 36 million acres in Iowa, and 30 million are devoted to agriculture. Of those, 25 million are planted with corn and soybeans.
“You have only two species of plants on 70 percent of our land,” Chris Jones told the packed meeting room at Iowa Lakes Community College in Emmetsburg on the evening of Sept. 1. “We cannot get the environmental and water quality outcomes that we want with that condition.”
Jones is a research scientist who spent his career working on water quality issues. Over the last decade, he’s been one of the leading voices among Iowans pushing to improve the state’s water. His 2023 book, The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality, discussed the science, economics and politics of the corn, soybean and CAFO model that dominates Iowa agriculture in a series of readily-understandable essays using often blunt and entertaining language.
“It’s apparent Iowans are ready for change,” Jones told the audience in Emmetsburg. “They’re ready for change, for a farming system to deliver better environmental outcomes, better outcomes for all Iowa citizens, and not just for agribusiness and the largest farmers. So we need a secretary of agriculture that’s going to do that.”
Jones is running in the November election to be that secretary of agriculture. He’s the Democrat challenging incumbent Mike Naig, the former Monsanto employee currently in his second full term in the office.
“I worked as a scientist studying this stuff. This is something we always talked about behind closed doors. Even if every farmer is doing everything perfectly, the pollution is probably going to be intolerable in this system, just because of the fundamentals here.”
The largely unregulated system that’s resulted in fields planted fencerow to fencerow and up to the edge of streams with just two crops has also transformed animal agriculture in the state. Livestock have been moved off of pastures and into CAFOs, confined animal feeding operations.
These large, factory-farming operations are why herds are more often smelt than seen in much of rural Iowa. In 1980, there were 68,000 farmers raising 13 million hogs in the state. Now, 4,000 farmers raise 25 million hogs.
“It should not be a surprise to us that we have these issues with hog manure when we have concentrated all this waste into the hands of just a few people,” Jones said in his Sept. 1 speech.
The massive increase in hogs and decrease in farmers is emblematic of what Earl Butz, President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, meant when he told farmers in the 1970s to “get big or get out.” Policy choices since Butz’s day, at both the state and federal levels, have created a situation that emphasizes maximum output per acre and consolidation, while effectively penalizing farmers who adopt more sustainable, environmentally friendly practices.
Despite Iowa politicians endlessly repeating “Iowa feeds the world,” the current system doesn’t even feed Iowa. Over 90 percent of the food Iowans eat comes from out of state. Iowa may be known for its corn, but only 1 percent of the state’s corn is intended for human consumption. More than half of the inedible corn being grown is used to produce ethanol.
The current system isn’t designed to serve the needs of the average farmer or the rest of rural Iowa.
Farm income in the state dropped 53 percent between 2022 and 2024, according to a new report from the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University. An analysis of demographic trends from 2000 to 2025 published in June by ISU’s Iowa Small Towns Project warns of a “[l]ooming population cliff in rural Iowa” as the hollowing out of rural communities continues.
“Outmigration, more deaths than births, and falling immigration will harm rural economies and communities in the latter half of the 2020s,” the analysis states. “Fewer people means fewer workers resulting in labor shortages, fewer students means school consolidation, fewer patients means hospital closures, and fewer customers means closure of Main Street business and other essential services (child care, senior services, and home construction).”
And what happens on farms doesn’t stay on farms. It’s felt throughout the state as agricultural runoff from the two-crop and CAFO system pollutes the Iowa’s waterways, causing problems such as massive fish kills, the toxic algae blooms that close state park beaches every year and the high nitrate levels with which water utilities struggle. It’s also a driver of the state’s cancer crisis.
Nobody in the audience at Emmetsburg needed to be told about Iowa’s cancer crisis. Emmetsburg is the county seat of Palo Alto County, which has a cancer rate 50 percent higher than the national average.
“The way to reverse this,” Jones said about the damage being done by the current system, “or at least nudge the Titanic in the right direction, is to bring diversity back to Iowa agriculture.”
Jones was in Emmetsburg on Sept. 1 for the “end of the beginning” of the campaign he officially launched in January. A new phase — the start of the final push to Election Day — would begin early the next morning, and in an unusual way, even for a grassroots-focused campaign like this one.
The final push was beginning with the “Paddle Trip for Clean Water.” Jones, a diehard kayaker and fisherman, would paddle his kayak down the Des Moines River on a five-day trip finishing at Birdland Park in Des Moines. He’d be joined by supporters in kayaks and canoes on the various segments of the trip. Every night when the paddlers reached their stopping point, there would be a campaign rally.
At first blush, Palo Alto County might not seem like the right place for a Democrat like Jones to kick off a new stage of his campaign. Donald Trump won Iowa by 13 percentage points in 2024, but he carried Palo Alto in the northwest by 45 percentage points. Two years earlier, Kim Reynolds sailed to victory there by 52 percentage points.
Palo Alto County is also where Mike Naig grew up on his family’s century farm. That’s one of the reasons Jones chose Emmetsburg as a stop on his first campaign swing through the state in January, and why he returned in September.
Jones describes Naig as a “secretary of agribusiness” who has only offered “Band-Aid and diaper” solutions to problems, seeking to contain or mitigate some of the damage caused by the current system without inconveniencing the system or the big ag corporations profiting from it.
“He says since he’s been secretary of agriculture, he’s spent $100 million a year on” reducing agricultural pollution and improving water quality, Jones said. “He’s been in there about 10 years, so that’s almost a billion dollars. Does the water quality look a billion dollars better to you?”
To be fair to Naig, he’s only been secretary of agriculture for about eight and a half years. But the point remains: the water does not look $850 million better.
Mike Naig was appointed deputy secretary of agriculture by then-Sec. Bill Northey in September 2013. At the time, Naig was manager of State and Local Government Affairs in Iowa for Monsanto. (“Manager of State and Local Government Affairs” is corporate-speak for “lobbyist.”) When Northey resigned in March 2018 to take a job in the first Trump administration, Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed Naig as his replacement.
Naig was not the obvious choice to take Northey’s place. There were a number of other prominent Republican politicians and influential ag sector leaders interested in the position. Rep. Pat Grassley publicly declared he wanted the job, and his grandfather Chuck publicly declared Pat should get it.
Naig stood out from other prominent candidates by not having his own powerbase. He would be the governor’s man. He still is.
Even though he had to run for his first full term months after being appointed, and ran successfully for a second full term in 2022, no one could be blamed if they thought Naig was still just a Reynolds appointee instead of an independently elected state official.
In May, a smiling Naig stood next to Reynolds as the governor announced her latest water quality initiative, Farm to Faucet. The initiative was created by a last-minute amendment to an appropriation budget bill in the legislature. There was no opportunity for public comment on the governor’s proposal, and there were no committee hearings to discuss it.
Farm to Faucet directs $319 million to different water quality projects over a 12-year period. Much of that money comes from repurposing unspent funds allocated for watershed improvement projects in 2018.
The “farm” part of the bill includes funding to encourage farmers to plant cover crops and buffer strips along the edge of fields, things the state was already doing. The “faucet” part includes funds for infrastructure updates, including money to expand the Central Iowa Water Works (CIWW) nitrate removal facility.
The CIWW nitrate removal facility is already the world’s largest nitrate removal facility. But even it strains to reduce the nitrate levels in water drawn from the Des Moines and Racoon Rivers to 10 mg per liter, as required by federal law. (There’s a consensus among scientists that the actual safe level is much lower, more like 5 or 3 mg per liter.) The nitrate levels in Des Moines and Raccoon this summer led CIWW to impose a water ban on its 600,000 customers, just as it had to do last summer.
Making the world’s largest nitrate removal facility even larger doesn’t really address the problem.
“Clean water is non-negotiable, and we stand here today to acknowledge that there is more work that needs to be done to modernize Iowa’s water treatment infrastructure, in our fields, in our communities and in our utilities,” Naig said at the governor’s May 1 news conference announcing the new initiative.
He’s been making statements like this — clean water is non-negotiable, progress is being made — during his entire time in office, as the state’s water problems continue to grow.
Jones addressed Farm to Faucet in a post on his Substack blog, The Swine Republic.
“As the midnight hour fast approached for the 2026 legislation session, someone apparently informed Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig and Governor Kim Reynolds that drinking polluted water might be an issue in the 2026 election,” he wrote. “… [I]t’s important to point out the plan requires the industry responsible for the pollution (agriculture) to be accountable NOT AT ALL, nor does it require them to pony up even a Republican red cent to help mitigate the problem. The taxpayer is required to shoulder the entire burden of this 50-year long problem.”
“Jones is indelicate but deals in facts,” Art Cullen wrote in the Storm Lake Time Pilot last November after Jones launched an exploratory committee before formally committing to run for secretary of agriculture.
Cullen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his editorials critiquing corporate agriculture in Iowa, has known Jones for years and often shared a stage with him.
“He is not the reassuring type,” Cullen said. “He will force an uncomfortable conversation about the way we do things. He calls out political and academic cowardice.”
This is Jones’ first run for office. He doesn’t sound like a politician. His speaking style is casual but informed by his decades as a research scientist. He also doesn’t look like the typical candidate; he wore cargo shorts to almost every campaign event this summer.
“I am what I am,” Jones told Little Village. “Some people have a greater capacity to mold themselves into something else. Maybe that’s an admirable trait, I don’t know. But I don’t have the capacity.”
Chris Jones grew up in Ankeny. He was always interested in science and the outdoors. Jones attended Simpson College, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, before going to Montana State University for a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry.
“Back then, if you wanted to do environmental science, you majored in analytical chemistry,” Jones said.
He managed a water quality lab at the Des Moines Water Works. He also worked at the Iowa Soybean Association, where he set up one of the state’s first independent water quality monitoring systems as part of Agriculture’s Clean Water Alliance.
In 2015, Jones joined the Iowa Flood Center, part of the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, the University of Iowa’s Hydroscience and Engineering center. There, Jones oversaw the Iowa Water Quality Information System, the sophisticated monitoring network recording data in the state’s waterway.
When Jones started at UI, the university was encouraging faculty and staff to create blogs to share their work with the public. He did.
“The public wasn’t hearing what the true stories were in terms of water quality,” Jones explained in a 2023 interview with Little Village. “So much propaganda is put out by the ag advocacy organizations and also state government that I thought it was important to try to describe these issues in real, honest terms to general audiences.”
The blog started attracting public attention. The public attention drew the attention of ag-business leaders and Republicans in the legislature. In 2019, the Des Moines Register published an op-ed by the public relations director of the Iowa Farm Bureau responding to a Jones blog post, mocking him and anyone else worried about environmental damage from hog CAFOs. The op-ed was titled, “Iowans should not be so perturbed about poop.”
In 2023, Jones was told that two Republican state senators were perturbed enough about his writing that they were threatening the funding for the water-monitoring network he oversaw. He’d been planning to retire in a few years, but decided to move that up to try to protect the funding. He retired from UI in May 2023. The legislature cut funding for the network the next year, and has not restored it.
Jones’ book, The Swine Republic, was published a few months after he retired. The Library of Congress selected it as Iowa’s entry on its 2024 list of “Great Reads from Great Places.”
In retirement, Jones continued writing about agriculture and Iowa’s water problems. He remained active in water quality advocacy. He was not, however, planning to run for office.
According to Jones, people began pushing him to run for secretary of agriculture in 2022. The pushing became more persistent last year.
The Iowa Department of Agriculture was created in 1923. In 1986, the legislature merged the department with the Department of Soil Conservation, creating the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS).
Iowa Code lists “encourag[ing], promot[ing], and advanc[ing] the interests of agriculture” as the department’s top priority. IDALS isn’t in charge of licensing CAFOs; that power belongs to the Department of Natural Resources. DNR also has direct responsibility for investigating pollution in the state’s waterways and fining the responsible parties, to the extent any agency does. (Agricultural runoff is exempt from almost all state and federal regulations.)
Jones has explained how he intends to use the limited authority of the secretary’s office in a 28-point plan on his campaign site. Parts of the plan are to make a more diverse approach to farming economically viable for farmers who want to transition out of the two-crop system, and to make it easier for new farmers to get started. He wants to encourage the cultivation of crops that Iowa used to lead the nation in producing, like oats and apples, and the return of animals to pasture.
Discussion of the plan makes up most of his standard campaign speech, and questions about diversifying agriculture dominate the Q-and-A periods at his events. But in an interview with Little Village, Jones explained some of his other plans.
“There are 14 bureaus in IDALS,” Jones said. “… There are things we can do immediately to affect change, just by the ways the bureaus are managed.”
He pointed to the Climatology Bureau.
“Do you ever hear IDALS talk about climate change? We can start honestly dealing with climate change as it relates to agriculture here.”
“The other big thing is making decisions on how to spend money on water quality projects,” Jones said. Describing Naig’s spending as a Band-Aid-and-diaper approach, Jones said he wants “to try to spend money in more targeted and strategic ways that are aimed at systemic change, and not just patching up the existing system.”
There’s also the bully pulpit aspect of the office.
“We see that Naig has basically used the office to be an advocate for the status quo, which is corn/soy/CAFO and corn ethanol,” Jones said. “That’s not how I intend to use the bully pulpit. I will advocate for more sustainable, resilient and humane systems.”
A new poll from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) indicates that Jones’ message of making fundamental changes to improve water quality might find a receptive audience among Iowa voters. The “Iowa Water Quality Survey” conducted from July 9 to 16 and published Sept. 10 questioned 800 likely voters on water issues, but not candidates running for any office.
“One of the things that stood out was that people were very knowledgeable and concerned about these issues,” CLF Policy Director Patti Truant Anderson told Little Village.
Eight-four percent of the respondents said they had heard about Iowa’s water quality issues recently. Sixty percent said “Water quality and the environment” were one of their top five issues in the coming election.
People who listed it as a top five issue repeatedly brought up nitrates in the water and the state’s high cancer rate as reasons for concern, before pollsters could ask.
“I think that shows there’s a high level of consciousness about these issues,” Truant Anderson said.
The survey also looked at attitudes toward Iowa agriculture. Almost everyone — 90 percent — had a favorable view of “small and medium-size independent farms.” But 76 percent said they had unfavorable views of “large-scale corporate industrial farming.”
Even with those numbers, any campaign based on making fundamental changes faces a massive challenge. Naig has the backing of the state’s most powerful agricultural interests, and all the financial support that comes with it. He also has the advantage of being a Republican in a state where that party has been dominant for a decade, with all the advantages of incumbency. What he doesn’t have is a history of accomplishments that have improved life for Iowans.
The Paddle Trip for Clean Water kicked off on the West Fork of the Des Moines River in Palo Alto County early on Wednesday, Sept. 2. It finished 100 miles downriver near Birdland Marina after 6 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 6. Sixteen people joined Jones on the first day of the trip. The numbers grew, and 55 paddlers participated during the final stretch from Boone to Des Moines.
There was a campaign event at Captain Roy’s bar and restaurant next to the Birdland landing after the last paddlers arrived. A tired and slightly sunburned Jones made a brief speech to the overflow crowd.
“Back in November, I signed up to be a sacrificial lamb,” he said. “And then something happened — I don’t really even know what — and now it looks like we actually might win.”
Winning will take sustained grassroots efforts, Jones emphasized, as will making meaningful change.
“We cannot get change here in Iowa, we cannot get our water clean, we can’t get our air smelling good, we can’t get clean water to drink, we can’t get safe beaches to swim at just by going into the voting booth and checking the correct box,” he said. “It takes more than that … the way change happens in the United States is through grassroots action.”
“That’s how it happens, that’s what this campaign is all about.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2026 issue.
