Chris Jones has my vote for Ag Secretary

If you want clean water across Iowa, he’s more likely to make it happen

ORLAN LOVE

Correspondent

For the first time in my 35 years as a newspaper writer and editor I am going to endorse a candidate for public office.

Running for secretary of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship are two candidates who present a clear choice: The incumbent, former Monsanto lobbyist Mike Haig, who carries water for the Big Ag corporations that pollute it. Enough said.

And challenger Chris Jones, an accomplished scientist and statistician, a gifted writer and speaker (who would love to debate his opponent), the foremost authority on water quality in the state and perhaps the nation, with a plan to put the fundamental human right to healthful water ahead of the corporate imperative to extract the state’s wealth while leaving behind pollution and cancer.

“We have a secretary of agribusiness. We need a secretary of agriculture striving to help all Iowans,” Jones said Sunday at a campaign stop in Independence.

With high input costs, low commodity prices, diminished autonomy and troubled consciences, farmers aren’t getting the outcomes they want, he said. With beaches closed, high and rising cancer rates, unsafe water in both private and municipal wells and silt-bottomed, cloudy rivers and streams, neither are the 95 percent of Iowans who don’t farm, Jones said.

Who’s getting the outcomes they want? With a rigged system that requires massive, expensive inputs of fertilizer, herbicide, fungicide and pesticide, the big chemical companies — Bayer, Koch, Syngenta, Corteva — always win, Jones said.

Jones doesn’t blame farmers. “They are human beings making decisions in their own self-interest,” he said. “They are locked into this corn-soybean-CAFO (confined animal feeding operation)- ethanol system. Most of us would do the same in the same circumstances.”

With 70 percent of the state planted to corn and soybeans, that system has become untenable, Jones said. “If all farmers do everything perfectly under such a system, we are still going to have intolerable levels of pollution,” he said. Many Iowans, including farmers, “have a feeling that this is just not right,” he said.

Jones said Sunday that he has “a sense that this thing (Iowa’s agriculture production system) is hanging by a thread — that farmers recognize their vulnerability to the multinational corporations selling them seeds, chemicals, fertilizer and machinery. Under this system, he said, we have to tolerate pollution, but that thread is unraveling.”

What can be done? Jones said go first for the low-hanging fruit. Among them he mentioned banning fall tillage and fall application of anhydrous ammonia — “bad practices that are allowed for the convenience of the farmer.” He also advocated riparian buffers —a 50-foot setback on all streams. “That’s conservation 101,” he said. The establishment of county zoning authority on the siting of CAFOs would help curb over-application of manure, he said.

More diversity on the landscape — with oats, hay, barley, apples and vegetables chipping away at the existing monoculture — would reduce pollution and reinvigorate the environment, Jones said.

“We have to develop markets and infrastructure for farmers who want to diversify, build off ramps to a more healthful and sustainable system, with reduced need for expensive and harmful inputs,” Jones said.

Water quality is not a partisan issue, Jones, a Democrat, said Sunday in Independence.

“Democrats have not wanted to talk about it any more than Republicans,” he said.

That’s because almost all elected state officials are under the thrall of Big Ag, which (like Don Vito Corelone) understands that you need the support and cover of politicians, attained through both carrots and sticks, to accomplish your goals.

Jones knows firsthand about the sticks, having retired from the University of Iowa’s IIHR— Hydroscience & Engineering in 2023 under pressure from state senators irked at his writings connecting fouled water with farm practices.

Remember the statewide referendum in 2010 in which Iowans approved a constitutional amendment to create a Natural Resources and Recreation Trust Fund? Sixty-three percent of Iowans voted to tax themselves to provide more than $200 million a year to do what state government would not — curb and clean up the pollution inflicted upon them by irresponsible multinational corporations. And now, almost 16 years later, the state and its corporate overlords have provided nothing but specious intimations that Iowans don’t really know what’s good for themselves.

Remember the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy of 2013, a list of suggestions for improving water quality in Iowa and the gulf of Mexico, which has not yet “scaled up” enough to even slow the growth of Iowa’s water pollution? Jones said those and many other examples of bad faith on the part of Iowa officials provide much of his motivation for seeking public office.

Okay. Enough suspense. I’m going with fishing buddy and fellow river rat Chris Jones for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.