Chris Jones, author of The Swine Republic and one of Iowa’s leading water quality advocates, has created an exploratory committee as he considers a run for Secretary of Agriculture next year.
“I think we need to rethink agriculture,” Jones told journalist Nina B. Elkadi. “Nobody’s happy. So why are we going to keep doing what we’re doing here with the corn, soy, CAFO scheme?”
Elkadi is an editor-at-large for Sentient, where she focuses on industrial agriculture and its impact on people and the environment. She was the first to report Jones filed the paperwork to launch the committee with the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board. According to Elkadi, if Jones does run, it will be as a Democrat.
Currently, the only declared candidate for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture is Mike Naig, the Republican who has held the office since 2018. Naig was first appointed to his position in April 2018 by Gov. Kim Reynolds, after then-Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey took a job in the first Trump administration. Naig was elected to a full term later that year and reelected in 2022. In both his runs, Naig had the backing of the Iowa Farm Bureau, ethanol manufacturers and major corporations like Monsanto.
Jones, who holds a Ph.D. is in analytical chemistry, retired in 2023 after a career working on water quality issues in Iowa, in private industry, at public utilities and most recently as a research engineer at the Iowa Flood Center, part of the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research (IIHR), the University of Iowa’s Hydroscience and Engineering center. At the center, Jones oversaw the sensor system that monitors water in the state’s rivers.
Since retiring from UI, Jones has continued working to reform agricultural practices that are largely responsible for polluting Iowa’s waterways, and causing environmental damage beyond the state, including in the Gulf of Mexico, where ag runoff creates the annual dead zone. In addition to starting his water quality-focused Substack and lecturing on ag and water issues around the state, Jones also currently serves as president of Driftless Water Defenders, a nonprofit founded last year “to confront head on industrialized agriculture’s assault on our water resources in the Driftless Area of northeast Iowa and statewide.”
Speaking to Little Village in 2023, Jones said he was retiring “a year or two” before he originally planned to. He explained his decision came in response to pressure applied to the university by two state senators, Dan Zumbach and Tom Shipley. Both are Republicans and farmers. Zumbach was the chair of the appropriations subcommittee of the Iowa Senate Agriculture Committee, which Shipley also served on.
“The story told to me was Zumbach and Shipley came to [UI’s lobbyist at the state capitol], and said, ‘You can’t be over here asking for money for various programs, especially the Iowa Flood Center, and continue to let this guy do what he’s doing with this blog,’” Jones recounted.
Zumbach denied threatening UI funding over “the contents of a blog.” Shipley didn’t respond to media inquiries in 2023, and UI wasn’t commenting.
A lot of Iowa Republicans leaders and representatives of the state’s industrialized ag were angry about Jones’ writing on ag, pollution and water quality. When Jones started at UI in 2015, the university was encouraging faculty and staff to create blogs and share their work with the public. Jones did. He started a blog hosted on the IIHR site. At first, he wrote mainly for academic readers and other professionals. But after a while, Jones decided to try to write for a wider audience.
“The public wasn’t hearing what the true stories were in terms of water quality,” he said. “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.”
Jones’ big breakthrough to the reading public came in 2019 with a blog post on a formula he devised to make the volume of shit produced by farm animals in Iowa more easily understood. The formula is complicated, but the results are eye-opening.
It concerns the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and solid matter defecated by pigs, beef cattle, dairy cattle, laying chickens and turkeys, and determines how many people would be needed to produce a similar fecal output.
“In total, these five species generate the waste equivalent to that produced by about 134 million people,” Jones estimated in March 2019.
After the USDA released new data on the number of farm animals in Iowa two months later, Jones updated his estimate to 168 million. At the time, there were 3.2 million humans in Iowa, according to the Census Bureau.
In his blog post, Jones explained the impact all that farm feces has on water quality in Iowa. By April 2023, there were enough complaints from pro-industrial-style ag that Jones moved his blog off the IIHR site, but continued writing. Then came the report of the conversation Zumbach said didn’t happen.
“The whole thing got me thinking,” Jones said. “Did I really want to keep working?
He announced he was retiring.
“And then Zumbach, three weeks later, sponsored this bill to kill the water quality sensor network, this program that I managed at the university,” Jones said.
He was referring to an appropriations bill that redirected $500,000, the exact amount it was going to use to fund the sensor network, to the Iowa Department of Agriculture. Senate Republicans said they could find better uses for the money.
The sensor network is still going after finding alternative sources of funding. Last month, the Polk County Board of Supervisors voted to appropriate $200,000 to support the sensor network.
Jones’ blog posts formed the basis for his 2023 book, The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality, which explains the science, economics and politics of its subject in plain, and often entertaining, language.
The Swine Republic is also the name of Jones’ Substack site. In an Aug. 6 post, Jones discussed next year’s elections and what a progressive platform for food and agriculture would look like, although he doesn’t mention the possibility of him running for ag secretary.
Since all registered voters have a choice in who occupies the office, one could think the Secretary of Agriculture should represent all voters equally, regardless of whether they farm, are a CEO at an agribusiness giant, or teaching kindergartners on Des Moines’ east side. Yes, a reasonable person could think that. But with [Sec. Mike] Naig, it’s been 1) Secretary of Agribusiness and 2) Secretary of Farmers, in that order.
It’s way past time that changed.
Almost every aspect of life in Iowa has been steamrolled by the corn-soybean-CAFO production model since the famous ‘fencerow to fencerow’ paradigm was promoted by Nixon’s racist USDA secretary Earl Butz in the 1970s. There can be no doubt that our farming systems, tenaciously held in place by politically powerful agribusiness interests, erode the quality of life for every Iowan—and that includes many closely connected to the industry itself.
Jones notes that water quality and the environmental damage caused by agriculture the way it is practiced are becoming more urgent topics of conversation as people are confronted with the continued decline of rural communities and growing public health concerns. They will likely be important topics in next year’s election.
“Don’t let candidates talk about water quality in the abstract,” he wrote. “We need action—NOW. We need detailed ideas—NOW.”
Jones then goes on to list a series of specific policy proposals on agriculture and the environment, food and rural development, and needed changes to the ag departments at the state’s three universities. He also presses the Iowa Department of Natural Resources to take its regulatory responsibilities more seriously.
Over the last 50 years, both political parties have been responsible for Iowans “becoming collateral damage as the Orc Army of Koch, Cargill, Bayer, ADM, Corteva and Tyson relentlessly extract all that is good about our state and leave us with the pollution and societal decay,” he writes.
“Jones is indelicate but deals in facts,” Art Cullen wrote in the Storm Lake Time Pilot about Jones as a potential candidate, after news of his exploratory committee broke.
Cullen, another of the state’s leading water quality advocates, has known Jones for years and often shared a stage with him.
“Jones is irascible,” Cullen writes. “He is not the reassuring type. He will force an uncomfortable conversation about the way we do things. He calls out political and academic cowardice.”
That’s a big contrast to Mike Naig, whom Cullen calls “a nice guy who avoids risk and difficult questions … His is the reassuring voice telling us that we are making progress on the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico voluntarily, when in fact we are not.”
Cullen thinks Jones could be an important candidate because of the issues he will force people to address during a campaign, but that Naig will be the prohibitive favorite to win in 2026.
“Mike Naig will have the Farm Bureau. Chris Jones has three chords and the truth.”
Jones has said he will make a final decision on running for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture in January.
