Chris Jones photo: Sentientmedia.org

Chris Jones shared this text of his full remarks at the Democratic Party convention on his public campaign Facebook page. I’ve reposted them below. Follow Chris Jones on social media. 

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“It was great being with so many supporters across the state at the Democratic Party convention yesterday. For those who couldn’t be there, I’m including my full remarks below.
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You may know that my professional training was as a scientist, and I worked in that capacity at several stops in my career: managing an environmental testing laboratory, consulting work for municipal water and wastewater utilities, laboratory manager at Des Moines Water Works, environmental scientist at the Iowa Soybean Association, and finally a research engineer at the University of Iowa hydraulics lab. Some of those work experiences have come in handy these past several months in my campaign for Secretary of Agriculture. I must also tell you that it’s clear to me now why there aren’t many scientists in politics.

Of course, one of our most famous scientists was Izaak Newton. Newton, who invented calculus, proposed in 1687 that gravity is a universal, invisible force of attraction existing between all matter. As legend has it, Newton never thought about gravity until one day he was sitting beneath an apple tree, and an apple fell upon his head, jolting his mind into awareness.

Thus I think it is with our body politic and water quality. Most have seen it as a 2nd- or 3rd tier issue, if indeed an issue at all, until the rotten apple of Iowa’s second-highest, and soon to be highest, cancer rate fell upon their heads. Scientists have known about the associations between large scale agriculture and negative human health outcomes for decades, but leaders in industry and government have refused to take notice. If Iowa does indeed have a cancer crisis, shouldn’t we as democrats demand our leaders treat it as a crisis? We sure as hell know that Republicans won’t.

I retired three years ago and imagined spending my retirement whiling away the days in my fishing boat, tending my garden and trying to write another book. So I come to politics not with career aspirations but out of a sense of duty, because I believe the degraded quality of life and human health consequences of large-scale agriculture is THE issue of our time in Iowa.

The world’s largest nitrate removal facility, of which you’re drinking water from today, was installed in 1992—two generations ago. When I worked at DMWW, of a morning I would walk from the laboratory to the pumping station to discuss with my boss the condition of the rivers on that day. My boss at the time was Ted Corrigan, who just retired as general manager a few months ago. When the rivers were gross and muddy and full of nitrate, Ted would ask ‘where’s the outrage?’. And I would say ‘yeah, where’s the outrage’. Sometimes I inserted a salty adjective in that sentence before ‘outrage’. Folks, I’m here to tell you, the outrage has arrived.

While some progress was made in the 1990s on soil erosion—thanks to a law, that being conservation compliance in the 1985 farm bill, water monitoring data shows us that nothing has really happened on nitrate pollution for the past 50 years, largely because we have no laws for the pollution. If I’m elected secretary of agriculture, I’m going to work to get those 50 years back and make 50 years happen in four years.

We lost control of our agriculture to corporate agribusiness and the federal government in the 1990s, and since then, the mantra has been ‘Bushels or Bust’. Today, for farmers, city dwellers and rural Iowa, that’s become Bushels AND Bust. Consolidation in the livestock industry has brought us 25 million hogs along with the untreated fecal waste equivalent to 168 million people. Farmers lose money, we get sick, and corporate agribusiness skates off with money after fouling our air, water and soil.

You might wonder where our current secretary of agriculture, Mike Naig, stands on all this. The truth is, we don’t have a secretary of agriculture. We have a secretary of AGRIBUSINESS. Iowa needs a secretary of agriculture that works for beneficial outcomes for ALL IOWANS. Trump trade policies and the Iran war hurt Iowa and Iowa farmers. DOGE eviscerates USDA and the remainder has not capacity to deliver conservation and other programs. Trump cancels millions in local food programs. Naig apparently has the hubris to still run on these local food programs. Does he stand up to Trump and defend Iowa and it’s farmers—HELL NO.

How do we achieve better water, a more prosperous rural Iowa and improve the quality of life for all Iowans? We cannot get the beneficial outcomes we want with only two species of plants on 70% of our land. We desperately need diverse farms growing crops like oats and other small grains. For our largest restaurant, which is our system of public schools, we need farmers growing fruit and vegetable crops and raising livestock humanely and sustainably.

We need to return cattle to pasture along with a significant number of hogs and poultry. Why watch western rivers, including the Colorado, dry up from irrigating alfalfa when we can grow it here, un-irrigated? Let’s work to bring back the 800 small scale meat processors we’ve lost over the past 60 years, along with small scale livestock production so we can enable farmers to be farmers again. These are much more long-lasting jobs than those for data center construction. We know Iowa farmers can do this profitably. I talk to some of them nearly every week.

Some or many farmers will prefer to stay in the fast lane of corn/soy/CAFO and ethanol. That’s great. But as this metropolitan area of 600,000 people goes through its second straight summer of restricted water use, leaving the fast lane without a speed limit is no longer a credible position. We CANNOT continue to give the industry license to do whatever they want with fertilizer and other inputs and then ask the taxpayer to pay to mitigate the pollution. It’s perverse.

Many say that what I am proposing is ‘going backward’, and that agriculture and society don’t like to go backward. Now that we’ve hollowed out our small towns to a shell of their former selves, now that we see our young people flee to distant cities and states, now that we see our loved ones die not of old age but a pollution-induced cancer, I say to these folks—what does going forward from this look like to you? Because here’s what it looks like to me—robotic tractors and AI farming 10,000-acre plots owned by billionaires and hedge funds. Is that the rural Iowa we want?

It’s within our power to create the sort of change I speak of. The solutions are not mysterious. While ongoing research and monitoring is always good and necessary, we don’t need more of it to ACT now. If we CAN create policies that reduce known risks NOW, then we should work NOW to create such policies. We don’t lack for solutions; what we lack is the political courage to enable them.

There are only 12 states that elect a secretary of agriculture, Iowa is one. All 12 presently are Republicans. Come January 3, Iowa is going to show America something different. From the heart of American agriculture, we’re going to change American agriculture from a system designed to enrich a few to one designed to benefit the many.”  –  Chris Jones

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