Chris Jones Leads Fearless Campaign Against Big Ag

Chris Jones is a fisherman, not a farmer. And, until 2023, he directed Iowa’s network of stream pollution monitors for the University of Iowa. With a university blog, he documented the pollution caused by runoff from large-scale farms, transforming scientific jargon about the sorry state of Iowa’s water into humorous stories anyone could understand. But what he wrote ran afoul of corporate ag, the most powerful industry in Iowa. Their allies in the state’s Republican-majority legislature pressured the university to silence his research and eventually voted to defund the water quality monitoring network Jones created.

Now retired, he’s taking the show on the road, campaigning as the Democratic Party candidate for a job that’s always been held by a farmer.

Iowans are living, and dying, with contradictions many no longer accept. The state claims to “feed the world,” but it can’t even feed itself. It imports an estimated 90% of its table food, with the majority of Iowa corn used for the state’s massive hog and chicken industry or for ethanol.

Meanwhile, the Iowa Farm Bureau touts Iowa’s status as the No. 1 producer in the nation for hogs, eggs, corn, ethanol and biodiesel, with agriculture accounting for $160 billion in the state’s economy. What they neglect to say is this system of industrialized agriculture makes Iowa the state with the fastest-rising cancer rates in the country, with the second highest overall cancer rate, and the No. 1 contributor to the Gulf of Mexico’s 7,000-square-mile dead zone.

The time might just be right for someone like Jones. He’s the first candidate in recent history to denounce putting corporate profits before the health of Iowa’s land, air, water and people.

In March, a new report from Iowa’s Harkin Institute at Drake University (a private institution) illuminated the damage. It found that four major contributors to cancer risk—pesticides, nitrates, PFAS (or “forever chemicals”) and radon—are ubiquitous across the state. Exposure comes from such sources as manure runoff from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs (Iowa has two-and-a-half times as many CAFOs as the next highest state), and the overapplication of fertilizer on large-scale commodity farms, which runs off into nearby streams and rivers. The Harkin Institute report also found that, among Iowans under age 50, cancer rates are increasing for six of the 10 cancer types associated with these four contaminants.

Jones’s stump speech is sacrilege in this land of feed and fuel.

“We CANNOT get the clean water and other environmental outcomes that we want when only two species (corn and soy) cover 70% of our land,” Jones says on his campaign website. “Real progress requires real diversification: more kinds of crops, a more diversified and resilient rural economy, and a broader group of Iowans owning and stewarding the land. That’s how we restore rural Iowa.”

Iowans haven’t heard this kind of talk in a very long time, largely because no one messes with the Farm Bureau, the umbrella front group for Big Ag. The Iowa Farm Bureau, an organization more powerful than its parent the American Farm Bureau Federation, has ruled the state’s ag debate with an iron fist for 70 years.

Like the Chamber of Commerce, local Farm Bureaus serve as networking organizations. But at the state and federal level, the Farm Bureau is a formidable political and lobbying machine, aggressively promoting industrial and corporate agriculture over all other interests.

The Iowa Farm Bureau resides in a marble palace on a 400-acre campus in West Des Moines. The largest segment of its 189,000 members are insurance customers, not necessarily farmers.

It’s in this belly of this beast that Jones has picked his fight. He travels the state calling out Big Ag as the cause of Iowa’s polluted waters, degraded small towns and lopsided farm economy. He’s even started a nonprofit, the Driftless Water Defenders, to spread awareness and launch grassroots organizing efforts.

“Consolidation in the livestock industry has brought us 25 million hogs along with the untreated fecal waste equivalent to 168 million people,” he told attendees at the Iowa Democratic Party state convention in June. “Farmers lose money, we get sick, and corporate agribusiness skates off with money after fouling our air, water and soil.”

In this context, Jones has momentum never seen by a Democratic candidate for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. He has raised $120,000 from 1,009 donors since he launched in January, which according to his campaign is more than twice any previous Democratic candidate for the position had raised at this stage of the race.

His defiance draws attention:

• He calls the public school system “Iowa’s largest restaurant” that should be buying fresh produce from local table food farmers
• He says every Iowan should get one free fruit tree to put in their backyard 
• He calls for public support for farmers who want to get out of the corn-soybean-hog system and farm more sustainably
• For those who don’t, regulating pollution from agricultural chemicals is on his agenda
• He describes efforts up until now as “Band-Aid and diaper conservation”

Republican incumbent Mike Naig has held the seat since 2018, having worked previously as a lobbyist for Monsanto before joining the Iowa Department of Ag and Land Stewardship in 2013. His campaign started 2026 with $316,000 in reserves. His largest infusion of funds since then—$150,000—is from the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC). Naig was elected finance chair of Ag America, a caucus of the RSLC, in February of this year.

Naig has distributed $2.7 million over 4 years under the new “Choose Iowa” program, a grant-based marketing program to help direct-to-consumer farmers promote Iowa-grown food. Yet Iowa corn farmers alone receive an estimated $1 billion per year in commodity program payments, according to the Environmental Working Group—payments that mainly go to the largest farms and accelerate the trend of farm consolidation, corporate monopolization and pollution.

The department’s name was expanded by the Iowa Legislature in 1986 to the Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. The secretary is one of only 12 in the nation elected directly by voters and is responsible for:

• Promoting the interests of agriculture, including horticulture, biofuels, livestock and bees
• Encouraging a relationship between people and the land in a way that avoids “irreparable harm” to the land
• Developing and implementing policies that, in the long term, inspire confidence in agriculture as an economic activity as well as a way of life
• Inspecting all farm and food-related commercial activity in the state.

Jones frequently acknowledges the limits of the position but considers his campaign an opportunity to change the debate in Iowa about the state’s relationship between agriculture, land, water and its citizens. The department’s mandate would give him wide latitude to do that much, even under the scenario of a politically hostile governor or legislature restricting his funding to align with their priorities.

Instead of campaigning now, Naig and the Republican establishment appear to be laying the groundwork far ahead of November’s election. The paltry funding for Choose Iowa is just enough for farm and food advocates to declare progress, if not victory. Then, days before the state’s legislative session ended, the majority party pushed through a $319 million water quality initiative over 12 years. Including federal funds from the American Rescue Plan, Jones estimates the total spent on water quality initiatives comes to $1 billion. Still, throwing big sums of money (largely in edge-of-field practices and cover crops) won’t solve the source of Iowa’s water pollution when 80% of nitrogen in central Iowa’s watersheds is linked to synthetic fertilizer runoff. 

At his rallies, Jones likes to ask people if their water looks $1 billion better. He is the first secretary of agriculture candidate in Iowa to say it’s obvious the state needs to do more, like wean itself off of corn and soybeans.  

His message gives voice to what many have believed for years. He’s turning out big crowds around the state. His social media is to be envied by any candidate on a tight budget.

Jones is willing to admit his campaign may be quixotic.

“Back in November, the main objective was to create discussion and get other candidates to embrace this as an issue,” Jones tells Barn Raiser. “People I trust told me, ‘There’s no chance you’re going to win,’ and I believed that, but the idea that other Democrats are talking about water quality now after I’ve been critical of that in the last few years, and a Republican gubernatorial candidate emerges making it central to his campaign? That’s mission accomplished.”

Now that his campaign has hit that mark, Jones sees the potential to reach a broader audience than ever. 

“What I talk about doesn’t strike people as liberal or conservative. It just strikes them as common sense,” he said. “Farmers aren’t getting good outcomes. At the same time, we’re getting this cancer. Why are we doing this? Nobody likes it.”

Iowa hasn’t taken seriously a candidate who speaks like Jones in decades. Yet, he is sowing fertile ground thanks to those who came before him. 

• Between 1987 and 2017 Iowa’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture pumped $26 million into more than 500 research projects from weed bots to the economics of local foods, putting table food back on the table in a state that had forgotten its agricultural roots. The center, founded in 1987, was a prototype for others around the country. Republicans defunded it in 2017, claiming Iowa had learned all it needed to about sustainable agriculture.  
• In 2015, Des Moines Water Works CEO Bill Stowe made national news when he sued the boards of supervisors of 3 counties in the Des Moines watershed for the cost of treating excessive levels of nitrates. The lawsuit sparked a heated statewide debate around Iowa ag and water that decades of nonprofit environmental advocacy had failed to do.
• In 2025 the Polk County Board of Supervisors released a report it had commissioned called Central Iowa Source Water Resource Assessment (CISWRA). Supervisors representing Iowa’s capital city and the home of Des Moines Water Works sought unassailable scientific proof about whether Iowa’s high cancer rates, which GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds blamed on binge drinking, were in fact related to upstream industrial agriculture. They found they were. 

Jones’s success will eventually incur the wrath of Big Ag and its friends the Farm Bureau, the Republican establishment and commodity groups. He’s faced them once in his role at the university—and he’s ready. 

“In a sense I’m the ideal candidate,” he says, citing his retired status. “I can shoot for the moon and I don’t have to cover my back. I can just say what I think is right. One thing people want in politics now is authenticity. People recognize when you’re speaking honestly. That distinguishes me from other candidates.”

Suzan EremMore by this author →

Suzan Erem is a fruit and nut farmer, working writer and community organizer in rural Cedar County, Iowa. Her Substack is Postcards from the Heartland. Her farm can be found at DracoHill.org.