“Back in November, I signed up to be a sacrificial lamb,” Chris Jones, the Democratic candidate for Secretary of Agriculture, told the overflow crowd at Captain Roy’s bar and restaurant in Des Moines on Sunday evening. “And then something happened — I don’t really even know what — and now it looks like we actually might win.”
For almost a decade, Jones has been one of the leading advocates for improving Iowa’s water quality, and changing the state’s industrial-style agricultural practices that have led to the extensive water pollution Iowans have lived with for decades. He was an extreme longshot when he officially announced his candidacy in January.
Jones, who has a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, spent his career focused on water quality issues in Iowa. He’s worked as an environmental scientist at the Iowa Soybean Association and managed the water quality laboratory at Des Moines Water Works. There, he helped oversee the operation of the country’s largest nitrate removal facility, which is needed to make sure the water from the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers the city relies on is drinkable. Next, he joined the Iowa Flood Center, part of the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, the University of Iowa’s Hydroscience and Engineering center, as a research scientist overseeing the sensor system that monitors the state’s rivers.
Jones retired from the university in 2023, “a year or two” earlier than he planned, he told Little Village a few months after stepping down. He retired early in response to reports of two Republican state senators threatening to cut UI funding for water monitoring because they objected to Jones’ increasingly popular online writing about water quality and agriculture in Iowa. One senator denied threatening funding over “the contents of a blog,” and the other never responded to questions about it, but the Republicans in the state legislature terminated the funding for the water sensor network over objections from Democrats.
Jones’ writing first broke through to the general public in 2019, with a post on his blog about 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 converts the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and solid matter defecated by pigs, beef cattle, dairy cattle, laying chickens and turkeys, to an estimate of 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.
The shift-equivalence formula is an example of Jones’ ability to produce vivid and easy-to-grasp accounts of complex scientific issues. In 2023, Ice Cube Press published a book of his work, The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality. The Library of Congress named the book as Iowa’s entry on its 2024 list of “Great Reads from Great Places.”
Since retiring from UI, Jones has continued writing about water quality and agriculture on his substack, also named The Swine Republic, and helped found the Driftless Water Defenders, a group focused on water quality in the Driftless area of northeastern Iowa.
People had been encouraging him to run for office, but Jones was reluctant. Both major parties have supported the corporate style of agriculture that dominates the state. Corn and soybean fields cover Iowa’s acreage, and most of the corn goes to ethanol. Only 1 percent of the corn grown is eaten by humans. Along with the corn and soybeans, the state leads the country in CAFOs crammed full of animals. These practices have been extremely profitable for big agribusiness corporations, but not for the dwindling number of smaller farmers in Iowa.
Between 2022 and 2024, net farm income in Iowa dropped 53 percent. Farm bankruptcies have been rising. Rural Iowa has steadily lost population, while farming the maximum number of acres of the two dominant row crops and sequestering the maximum number of animals in CAFOs have damaged the water quality in both rural areas and in the cities downstream that rely on rivers for their water supply.
Some elected Democrats in Iowa have been critical of the state’s agribusiness model, but are cautious when it comes to proposing changes to the system. Jones wants to create opportunities for fundamental changes to the system.
On his campaign site, Jones has detailed proposals for “off ramps” that would make it economically viable for farmers who want to move away from the corn/soybean/CAFO system and turn to crops that were formerly prevalent in Iowa, such as oats and apples, which the state lead the country in producing in the first half of the 20th century. Such crops are more environmentally sustainable, and require fewer inputs (such as fertilizer and other chemicals), reducing the cost to farmers. This would make it easier for new farmers to get started.
Jones also proposes returning cattle to pasture, as well as bolstering local food systems, in part as a way to provide markets for more diversified farm goods. Despite the constantly repeated refrain that “Iowa feeds the world,” Iowa doesn’t feed itself. More than 90 percent of food eaten in the state comes from beyond its borders.
For farmers who want to stay in what he calls “the fast lane” of intensive corn and soybeans production, Jones is proposing some basic regulations, such as not planting crops up to the edge of a stream. Other states require a setback from streams; Iowa doesn’t. Iowa relies on voluntary compliance, even when the state’s other policies make it economically advantageous, if only in the short term, not to comply.
Iowa Democrats have never really advocated for fundamental reform in agriculture, and only occasionally endorse regulatory mandates to replace ineffective voluntary measures. Iowa Republicans have firmly opposed both. Such changes were often described as politically impossible in the state.
What’s changed in Iowa to make it possible for a political newcomer to campaign on making fundamental changes to the system that’s held firm to power since the ’90s? Jones provided a significant part of the answer last month during his speech at the Iowa State Fair: “The outrage has arrived.”
“I worked here in Des Moines for many years, I worked at the Des Moines Water Works, I managed a laboratory,” Jones told the crowd at the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox. “In the morning, I would go from the laboratory over to the pumping station to talk to my boss. If the Racoon River was foamy and smelly and full of nitrate, I’d get over there and he’d say, ‘Where’s the outrage that this is the water that we have to treat for 500,000 people?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, where’s the outrage?’”
“And so I think in the last year or two, the outrage has arrived. We’re finally fed up.”
The lived experience of Iowans dealing with poor water quality, the damage it does to quality of life and the health problems associated with it, including the state’s surging rate of cancer, has been backed up by recent studies.
Last year, the comprehensive “Currents of Change,” a 232-page report summarizing the findings of a two-year scientific study of Raccoon River and Des Moines River water quality, found “the highest nitrate values [in drinking water sources] nationwide are predominantly found in Iowa.” Earlier this year, the Iowa Environmental Council and the Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement published “Environmental Risk Factors and Iowa’s Cancer Crisis,” a report summarizing the latest research on factors driving Iowa’s cancer rates, including agricultural pollution.
The problem of nitrate pollution in the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers has also been driven home for the 600,000 customers of the Central Iowa Water Works, as the utility has had to ban lawn watering during the past two summers to conserve water because its filtration system was overwhelmed by the amount of nitrate in the two rivers.
Republican Mike Naig, the incumbent secretary of Agriculture, favors maintaining the current voluntary system of addressing agricultural pollution. Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed Naig ag secretary in March 2018, after Bill Northey, the previous secretary, took a job in the first Trump administration. Naig had served as deputy secretary of Agriculture since September 2013. Before that, Naig had been manager of State and Local Government Affairs for Monsanto in Iowa and held other jobs in agribusiness. He was elected to his full term as secretary eight months after being appointed. Naig was reelected in 2022.
“Republicans don’t have anything to run on,” Jones said at Captain Roy’s on Sunday. “They certainly can’t run on clean water. Naig has been in there almost 10 years now, spent a billion dollars on clean water.”
“Does the water look a billion dollars cleaner to you? Because it doesn’t to me.”
Jones kept his remarks at Captain Roy’s brief, explaining he was tired and, “I probably smell bad.” He’d just finished five days kayaking down the Des Moines River with supporters about 10 minutes before making his speech.
The trip started on the west branch of the Des Moines River in Palo Alto County, and featured campaign events at Humboldt, Fort Dodge, Lehigh and Boone at the end of each day on the river, before finishing up next to Captain Roy’s at Des Moines’ Birdland Park landing. Jones used his “Paddle Trip for Clean Water” to kick off the final stretch of his campaign.
“The incumbent is going to have over $2 million to spend, he’s going to have a blank check, between now and Election Day, whereas we have to raise money through grassroots action,” Jones told the people packed into Captain Roy’s. “We have to raise enthusiasm through grassroots action, and get people to the polls through grassroots action.”
Naig has been backed by the big agribusiness interests in each of his runs for office. Last week, the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation formally endorsed him, declaring Naig a “Friend of Agriculture.” Its support for Naig was never in doubt. The Farm Bureau also endorsed Ashley Hinson for Senate and every Republican candidate for Congress. Surprisingly, the Farm Bureau broke with tradition and did not endorse a candidate for governor.
“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,” Jones said on Sunday. “It takes more than that, and if you read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, it says 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.”
