"We deserve better": Why Chris Jones may run for secretary of agriculture

"What farmers do affects everyone"

This original reporting and analysis first appeared at Bleeding Heartland and is shared here as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. For regular emails linking to all recent Bleeding Heartland articles and commentary, subscribe to the free Evening Heartland newsletter.

“I heard a physician say one time, you can tell a lot from a person by looking at their skin, and if their skin looks good, generally they’re in pretty good health,” Chris Jones told a capacity crowd at The Harkin Institute at Drake University on November 12. “And the way I see it, I look at Iowa, our lakes and our rivers and our aquifers in that same way.”

Those polluted waters “don’t look good” now, Jones said. “They’re sick,” and they indicate “we have a malignant tumor growing on the inside.”

The malignant tumor, in Jones’ view, is “corporate agriculture.” But consolidation in agriculture and the dominant model for farming have “had effects far beyond our water.” They have also “contributed greatly to the decline of rural Iowa.”

After sounding the alarm for years through his writing and public speaking, Jones is now exploring a Democratic campaign for Iowa secretary of agriculture in 2026. He spoke to Bleeding Heartland after the event in Des Moines about his vision for change and the policies he would champion if he runs for statewide office.

An authority on farming and water quality

Jones has spent most of his professional life at the intersection of agriculture and water quality in Iowa. He was a lab supervisor at the Des Moines Water Works for eight years before joining the Iowa Soybean Association as an environmental scientist. He moved from there to the University of Iowa, where he spent eight years as a research engineer and adjunct associate professor.

A wider audience discovered Jones’ work on conventional farming and water pollution through a blog he began while working for the university. (Bleeding Heartland republished several of those posts.) A collection of essays from the blog—The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality—has had multiple printings since its publication in 2023.

Along with James Larew, Jones co-founded the nonprofit Iowa Driftless Water Defenders in 2024 “to confront head on industrialized agriculture’s assault on our water resources in the Driftless Area of northeast Iowa and statewide.” The group has already filed multiple lawsuits and challenged environmentally harmful actions by corporations and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

Now Jones writes The Swine Republic email newsletter for around 5,600 subscribers, putting him among the most widely-read Substack authors from Iowa. He’s a popular speaker around the state as well. At the Harkin Institute, he was in dialogue with Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who recently published his own collection of writings, called Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World. (He did not discuss any 2026 election during the event, which was not connected to his possible campaign.)

“What farmers do affects everyone”

Jones agreed to a interview shortly after the event. Watch here:

For some candidates, an exploratory committee is just a formality. But Jones, who described himself as a “novice” in this area, said he is genuinely considering his options. He plans to decide by January whether to run. Major-party candidates for Iowa’s statewide offices (aside from governor) must collect at least 2,500 signatures on nominating petitions, including at least 77 signatures from at least eighteen counties, to submit to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office by March 13.

Jones began thinking (but “not very seriously”) about seeking this office before the 2022 election cycle, when he was still working at the University of Iowa. He’s put a lot of thought into the issues, so he feels it’s natural for him to consider running for secretary of agriculture.

Many people have encouraged him to run. While some of his supporters feel “the sky’s the limit,” he is “more realistic” about the challenges of a statewide campaign. “You don’t do what I do and not get used to losing.”

How would Jones respond to Iowans who think the secretary of agriculture should be someone who has worked in farming, or at least grew up on a farm?

“We have 80,000 farmers here, but all of us vote for the office,” he said. From his perspective, “what farmers do affects everyone, and there’s no reason why non-farming people should just cede this office cycle after cycle after cycle to an agricultural person.”

Jones added that the incumbent, Republican Mike Naig, came to the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship from the Monsanto Corporation, where he was a lobbyist. He didn’t go directly from the farm to being a statewide official. “I think the idea that it needs to be a farmer, or it needs to be someone that works in agribusiness is extremely limiting, and not healthy for the state. You know, we all vote for this position. So this position should be one of us, right? And you shouldn’t have to be a farmer or be in agribusiness to have ideas about agriculture.”

“We deserve better than just ‘not MAGA’”

On his newsletter, Jones has harshly criticized some Democratic politicians, including former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, State Auditor Rob Sand (the front-runner for the 2026 nomination for governor) and State Senator Zach Wahls (a candidate for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat). So I wondered: if nominated for secretary of agriculture, would he endorse the whole Democratic ticket?

“Yes, of course,” Jones said. He went on: “I want to inspire those people. I want to inspire them to embrace these issues.” When he travels around the state, he sees people excited about ideas for making Iowa better. “The bar should not be ‘not MAGA.’ [..] We deserve better than just ‘not MAGA.’”

He sees environmental issues as part of that agenda. Jones told the audience at Drake that he’s “bewildered” few Democrats campaign on a problem affecting every Iowan. “Nobody wants to drink poisonous water.” Moreover, many of our state’s 130 lakes “were constructed at taxpayer expense,” and they’re unusable during the summer because of E. coli bacteria or toxic algae blooms. We pay the DNR to restore them time after time, like Lake Darling near Fairfield. “This is a quality of life issue,” regardless of anyone’s politics.

Jones also wants Democrats to call for expanding public lands. “How hard is it to just say that? More parks, we need more parks.” He observed that several nearby red states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, even Arkansas—have much larger tracts of public land than Iowa.

Eyeing “a big bully pulpit”

While many of Jones’ proposals would require legislative action, he said the secretary of agriculture has some discretion in how to spend appropriated funds. This year, Naig announced a $3 million investment from a state water quality fund for a pilot project in the Des Moines and Cedar River watersheds. At The Swine Republic, Jones pointed out that the money could support buffer strips along roughly 1 percent of the stream length in the project area. He likened the proposal to “a fart in a hurricane, at best.”

During our interview, Jones noted that although the secretary of agriculture can’t enact legislation, the office provides “a big bully pulpit.” There’s an opportunity for someone to “articulate a different idea” about how we could be farming.

Jones believes “the first thing we need to do is look at how we’re delivering money across the countryside.” Right now a lot of public funds are focused on “edge of field practices” for corn and soybean growers, but “there will never be enough money to improve water quality in that way.” Anyway, the edge of field practices “don’t help the system become healthier. They’re just treating the symptoms. They’re not treating the disease.”

How could we better spend that money? Jones has lots of ideas.

“We need diversity on the landscape”

Earlier this year, Jones wrote and published a “Progressive Platform for Iowa Food and Agriculture.” It’s not a blueprint for small, incremental change.

“We can’t continue to try to put band-aids and diapers on this system and think we’re going to get the environmental outcomes that we want,” he told the audience at Drake. “We can’t have two species covering 75 percent of the landscape” and get good outcomes.

Instead, “We need diversity on the landscape. We need a diversity of crops, we need a diversity of economy, and we need a diversity of people.”

“Diversity of crops” means not just corn and soybeans. A more diverse economy would involve “fundamental changes in the structure of agriculture,” not only for the environmental benefits, but also “to restore rural Iowa to something resembling what it used to be.”

And “diversity of people” would mean “some changes in who farms,” because most of today’s farmers are old white men. As an older white man himself, Jones quipped, that’s “not a demographic that is receptive to change. […] That’s a demographic that doesn’t want to change their underwear!”

Jones rejects the idea that degrading the environment is a necessary trade-off for a strong economy. He often hears that farmers “don’t get the economic outcomes that they want. So why are we doing what we’re doing? It makes no sense.”

He wants to get rid of some of the “taboos” around agriculture and have a public conversation about what we’re doing and what could be done differently.

Challenging taboos is a Chris Jones trademark.

“We need to get rid of ethanol”

Many in the Harkin Institute auditorium laughed when Jones offered what he called “an easy first step” for Democratic politicians: “You’ve got to drop this stupid, moronic rhetoric that’s promoted by the ag advocacy groups” like the Iowa Farm Bureau.

One of their staple lines is, “We feed the world.” Jones was derisive: “We don’t even feed Polk County.”

He wants to “rethink this whole system” and abandon the “perverse” way most of Iowa is farmed today. To get away from the two-crop rotation, “we need to get rid of ethanol.”

Celebrating ethanol has been a bipartisan feature of Iowa politics for many years. But Jones is adamant: “This decision to make fuel ethanol from corn here in Iowa is the worst natural resource decision that has ever been made in this country’s history.” Not only has it “polluted our water, it’s polluted the Gulf of Mexico.”

Responding to an audience question, he connected the dots between biofuels policy and land prices that keep many young farmers out of the profession. Why does Iowa farmland cost between $15,000 and $25,000 an acre? Because the Renewable Fuel Standard “created this guaranteed market for corn.” According to Jones, the price of Iowa farmland “goes in lockstep” with the amount of fuel ethanol produced in the U.S. “It’s just simple economics. And so we need to get rid of the Renewable Fuel Standard.”

What about the estimated 7,000 jobs in Iowa that depend on the ethanol industry? Jones sees things differently: around 11,000 square miles of “the best land on earth”—the area of 20 whole Iowa counties—is devoted to growing corn for ethanol. Yet that practice only produces 7,000 jobs. “We ought to produce ten times that many jobs with that land.”

Jones wants to take on the corporations and “oligarchs” that benefit from the current system. But that doesn’t mean he’s against using public funds to support farmers.

The carrot: Off-ramps for farmers

When an audience member asked, wouldn’t you need to pay farmers to grow less corn and soybeans, Jones countered, “We’re paying for the monstrosity that we have now.”

He would like to “reimagine what farm programs look like.” Maybe subsidized crop insurance isn’t the best way to help farmers, but he envisions “off-ramps” for those who are “pigeon-holed into this system.”

As he mentioned during our interview, perhaps we could provide incentives for farmers to grow oats instead of corn and beans, or convert row crops into pasture. Those would “produce better environmental outcomes and help the system become healthier.”

Jones reminded the Drake audience that at one time, Iowa was the top oat-growing state in the U.S. Now the huge mill in Cedar Rapids imports most of the oats processed there. If we can force gas stations across the state to sell E15 ethanol blends, “Why can’t we make Quaker Oats use some oats that are grown here from Iowa?”

Speaking of taboos, Jones doesn’t spare the environmental movement. He wrote in his most recent post at The Swine Republic, “I can’t shake the idea that climate change warriors and other environmentalists have made a terrible mistake by focusing so much energy on cow farts and other environmental degradation caused by cattle.”

Cattle grazed on pasture produce less greenhouse gas emissions than growing corn and soybeans on the same land, he said at The Harkin Institute. Why don’t we see animals on the land anymore? “It’s because of the renewable fuel standard,” which incentivized farmers to put row crops on marginal land, like hilly parts of southern and western Iowa.

“We need cattle back here,” but not in livestock confinements. They should be in pastoral systems with crop rotations and animals moved around the field in paddocks. He supports economic incentives to spur that change.

The stick: Regulating pollution

A recurring theme in Jones’ writing is that Iowa cannot continue to rely solely on voluntary measures to combat agricultural runoff. As he told the Drake audience, “If what you do affects everybody, then everybody should have a say in what you do.”

That may mean that for some farmers who want to stick with their current model, “we’re going to regulate the hell out of them.”

Here’s one example: applying fertilizer in the autumn leads to more nitrates in our waterways. But the practice is common, because it’s cheaper for farmers to buy nitrogen in the fall than in the spring. Making things worse, they tend to apply more because they know they will lose more of what they put on the ground.

There’s “a real easy fix to this,” Jones told the audience. You tax fall application, so the price of fertilizer is equivalent to what farmers would pay in the spring. It “sounds easy,” but “our political leaders have no courage” to talk about a practice that we know is polluting drinking water in many Iowa cities and towns.

He floated other ideas for regulation, such as limiting how many livestock can be in a certain watershed.

Another “big problem” in Iowa and elsewhere, Jones said, is that more than half the farmland is owned by people who are not farming it. A renter will not approach conservation the same way as someone who owns the land they farm. Meanwhile, the owners want a return on their investment.

How can we get landlords to divest themselves of this land? One way would be “to regulate the pollution” on rented land. For instance, Iowa could require cover crops on all rented land, or ban fall application of fertilizer.

To those who say the system can’t be changed, Jones disagrees. “We created this behemoth of an ethanol industry through policy.” So “we ought to be able to create something different and something better through policy, if we only had some political leaders that had the courage to do that.”