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Change vs. ‘the mess that got us here’ on Iowa’s ballot

Every American state and U.S. territory has either a secretary of agriculture, director of agriculture or commissioner of agriculture. Only 12 states–mostly in the South–elect their ag leader; all others are appointed.

Iowa, however, is a Midwestern exception; it elects its ag chief. As the nation’s second largest (by sales) farming state, the office isn’t a grin-and-grip, part-time job; the secretary drives the state’s $65 million Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.

That latter area, Land Stewardship, is the crucial focus of the 2026 ag race that pits Mike Naig, the 13-year Republican incumbent with four generations of Iowa farm roots, against scientist and political novice, Democrat Chris Jones.

In a state with red hot House, Senate, and governor races, the winner of the Jones/Naig race could create a big enough wave to affect some races now too close to call.

But the stakes are bigger than just politics. Jones, the upstart, is not only challenging Iowa Big Ag brahmas, he’s also taking on their biggest sacred cows: their devotion to ethanol and CAFO livestock production, and how both combine to deliver Iowa some of the dirtiest, most unsafe water in the nation.

It’s a debate that agriculture everywhere needs. At the ground level, the Hawkeye State–like many states–is a prodigious farm factory that ranks first or second in U.S. production of corn, eggs, soybeans, hogs, ethanol, and oats.

But all of this production carries a heavy cost for every Iowan, rural or urban. According to a March 2026 report issued by the Iowa Environmental Council (IEC) and the Harkin Institute, “Iowa has the second-highest cancer incidence rate in the nation and is one of only two states where the rate is rising.”

Research points to Iowa agriculture as the key driver: “Iowa’s intensive agriculture footprint results in some of the highest pesticide application rates in the nation,” noted the IEC report. That intensity includes 13 million acres of crop production, overuse of nitrogen fertilizers, and “2.5 times as many Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations”– or CAFOs–”as the next highest state.”

In fact, the estimated manure output of Iowa’s 24 million hogs, 54 million chickens, and 3.5 million cattle often exceeds an unimaginable 100 billion pounds a year. That’s equal to the waste of more than 150 million people, or the populations of the largest seven U.S. states combined.

What happens to these mountains of manure? Most are simply returned–over-applied, in fact–to farmland as cheap, home grown fertilizer that, sooner than later, reappears throughout the state’s private and public water supplies. Everyone knows it.

Few, however, know it better than Jones who has spent his 40-year-plus career as a scientist, author, and advocate for clean water. He’s a native Iowan who centered his life’s work on making Iowa work better–even if it meant taking on Big Ag and its undeniable link to the state’s disproportionate cancer rate, chronically polluted water, and rapidly depopulating rural areas.

It all “has to be on the table now,” Jones relates in a telephone interview, “because this is the system that brought us this mess and it won’t be the system to get us out of this mess. We need change.”

He’s dead right. We’ve spent the last two generations building an export-directed commodity juggernaut designed for a global market without low-cost, highly productive competitors like today’s Brazil and Argentina, and Australia and New Zealand.

If that world doesn’t exist anymore, why do the federal policies that built it still exist?

We need more healthy food, not more manure, ethanol, multi-billion-dollar bailouts, polluted waterways, and cancer.

And Iowa–and the rest of American farmers and ranchers that want to be in business a generation from now–need change. We need Chris Jones as bad as Iowa needs him.

© 2026 ag comm

© 2026 Alan Guebert
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104