“Time to change”- Iowa water quality scientist launches long-shot bid for state office

Three years ago Chris Jones was a highly regarded research engineer at the University of Iowa, where he directed stream pollution monitoring work and published details about the state’s dismal water quality in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Jones also authored a university-sponsored blog, where he regularly identified agriculture as the primary source of the state’s calamitous water pollution.

Jones’ work garnered many supporters, but also enemies as he poked the biggest bear in Iowa – the state’s $44.8 billion-a-year industrial farm sector. In 2023, powerful legislative allies of Iowa’s farm sector strong-armed the university to kill Jones’s blog and push him out of his academic post. They then took aim at eliminating funding for the stream monitoring network.

By June 2024, Jones became president of Driftless Water Defenders, a nonprofit group focused on protecting the waters of northeast Iowa, and published a book exposing what one reviewer called the “cropaganda” that is “behind the destruction of the once beautiful waters of Iowa.”

Now, Jones is throwing down a new challenge to Iowa’s agricultural industry — launching a longshot political campaign to serve as Iowa’s 18^th agriculture secretary, one of seven statewide executive officers elected by Iowa’s citizens. Running as a Democrat, his message is two-fold: hold agriculture accountable for widespread environmental contamination, and enhance economic incentives for farmers in ways that encourage environmentally safer crop and livestock production practices.

“On the one hand, our citizens aren’t getting the environmental outcomes that they want,” Jones said in an interview. “On the other hand, farmers aren’t getting the economic outcomes that they want.”

“So why do we continue with this production model? The reason we’re doing it is because the big corporate agribusiness entities are getting the outcomes that they want. The Cargills of the world, Syngenta, Koch Industries, Corteva,” Jones said. “These companies sell the inputs for agriculture and buy the commodities. Essentially, we have these companies coming into Iowa and extracting the wealth from this fertile landscape. We’re left with the pollution. It’s time to change that.”

“Where’s the accountability?”

Though there’s no polling yet, Jones’ chances appear to be a political reach. Merely running as a Democrat in deep red Iowa makes his chance of election difficult. The last Democrat to win the office was 19 years ago, and only four other Democrats have been elected since the agriculture secretary position was established in 1923.

Jones has never held public office, and the seat he seeks now oversees a farm industry second only to California in annual cash receipts, second only to Texas in the number farmers and home base for some of the biggest corporations in US agriculture.

Still, Jones’ bid for public office comes amid rising unrest among Iowans over mounting evidence that pesticides, fertilizers, manure and other contaminants from Iowa farms and livestock operations are contaminating waterways used for drinking water, fishing and swimming, and likely contributing to the rising cancer rates that are impacting families across the state.

Iowa has the second-highest rate of cancer in the nation, and has become one of only two US states where cancer overall is increasing. Leukemia, as well as cancers of the pancreas, breast, stomach, kidney, thyroid and uterus, are among the different cancer types on the rise across Iowa, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Many of the chemicals and other pollutants contaminating water sources are scientifically linked to these cancers as well as other health problems. The state has documented more than 7,000 private water wells contaminated with nitrate, for instance, a byproduct of commercial fertilizer and manure. Most state residents consume measurable levels of nitrate in their drinking water, according to University of Iowa data. Peer-reviewed studies have found long-term exposure to nitrate in drinking water is linked to many cancers.

Iowa’s water pollution and its link to disease is now a top-tier political issue in one of the nation’s important farm states.

“I think there’s a jail break about to happen here in Iowa over water quality,” Jones said. “Last year Des Moines rationed water for two months because there was so much nitrate from agriculture in their water.”

“We have lakes in Iowa that are unusable in summer, year after year, because of algae blooms. A lot of them are constructed lakes that taxpayers paid for, and state parks were built around them, and they’re disgusting,” he said. “Things are worse now than they’ve ever been. So where’s the accountability here?”

The Iowa farm sector is so nervous about Jones’s message that two months before Jones launched his campaign, Mike Naig, a Republican running for a third term as state agriculture secretary, was labeling Jones as anti-agriculture.

“You’ve got somebody that is a, well, he’s been prolific in his writing about agriculture,” Naig was quoted as saying in a report by The Gazette in Cedar Rapids. “I think you could say he hates ag. He hates farmers.”

Jones responds that he respects farmers and his aim is to protect their health, the health of their families, and the well-being of Iowa’s small farm communities and rural counties, many of which are losing jobs and population.

An “everyman” campaign

Jones, who is 65 years old and earned a Ph.D. in chemistry, was raised in Ankeny, then a small town north of Des Moines. He’s a scientist by training and an intellectual who can summon at will a deep reservoir of facts, figures, and historical context about the development of Iowa agriculture and where it strayed down the perilous path of corporate consolidation, toxic chemical use, and concentrated livestock operations that generate 110 billion pounds of water-polluting manure annually.

Jones doesn’t look the part of a highbrow academic. Big and bulky, like a Midwest football lineman, he dresses for public appearances in casual outdoor garb appropriate for his favorite pastime – fishing the rivers and streams of northeast Iowa. He bolsters his regular guy image by traveling to campaign appearances in his Ford F-150, and sleeps inside the truck’s 1985 Jayco sliding camper.

The camper illustrates his “everyman” approach, Jones said. “That’s what we’re trying to promote here. This is a campaign for every man and every woman, and not for agribusiness.”

In August, as he began seriously considering entering the race, Jones published “A Progressive Platform For Iowa Food and Agriculture.” It argues for an array of reforms, including establishing regulations on farm-related discharges to water, giving local governments zoning authority to oversee big animal feeding operations, and developing a plan to reduce corn production and the more than 11 billion pounds of commercial fertilizer used to grow it.

“A different direction”

If Jones manages to win the June primary, it would set up a contest between Jones and Naig that arguably would be the most significant campaign for an elected agriculture position in the US since Jim Hightower won the race for Texas agriculture commissioner in 1982.

Hightower, a gifted Texas-born orator and skilled researcher who spent time on Capitol Hill, described himself during the campaign as a “grassroots populist” running against the “powers that be.” He won 60% of the vote by focusing his platform on protecting consumers and empowering small farmers against corporate agribusiness.

More than 40 years later, Jones’s platform is equally ambitious, advocating a new way of conducting farming in Iowa.

“People want the truth, right?” Jones said. “There’s so much propaganda associated with this topic. We’re just immersed in crap from the agriculture industry here. It’s difficult for people to know what’s true.”

“I’m n0t doing this so I can see some incremental change here in Iowa. I’m doing it because I want to see us transition to something different and better. I see that it’s going to take some courageous political leadership to shove this giant in a different direction.”

(A version of this article was published by Circle of Blue.)