Ag secretary candidate Chris Jones touts systemic changes to Iowa agriculture

Jones joined Iowa cattle farmers in expressing disappointment at Trump’s Friday announcement that he is suspending tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef, saying the move isn’t helpful to farmers in and outside of Iowa.

“High demand creates better profitability for cattle production, so why is the president, you know, kicking farmers in the gut with this 660 million pounds of hamburger that’s only going to be around for 90 days,” Jones said.

Jones is running against incumbent Republican Mike Naig, who spoke on the soapbox Aug. 17.

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Iowa has been taking an incremental approach to trying to fix Iowa’s water quality and other problems, Jones said, like encouraging voluntary adoption of conservation policies and spending $1 million at a time in different areas of “the corn-soy system and the CAFO system,” and these efforts have not worked.

The “most important thing” Jones said he shares with people about creating a more resilient and thriving agriculture industry in Iowa, as well as Iowa’s water quality, is to diversify farm operations. Some have told Jones this practice would send Iowa agriculture backward, to which he responded that going forward the way things are “looks pretty bad” to him.

Farmers need to grow more than just corn and soybeans but expand into fruits and vegetables, Jones said, as well as create more pastures for cattle in order to rebuild Iowa’s cattle industry. These practices would help with sustainability as well as diversify the agriculture economy in the state, he said.

“We need systematic change in this farming system if we’re going to get the environmental outcomes that we want,” Jones said. “At the same time, we need to do that in a way that preserves farmer incomes, preserves their livelihoods, preserves their way of life, but also help(s) us.”

“Common sense regulations” on concentrated animal feeding operations and corn and soy production would help clean up Iowa waterways, Jones said, alongside taxpayer-supported off ramps to help farmers transition into better practices.

Jones said he also wants to support small-scale livestock production as well as in-state meat and grain processing to keep those economic benefits in Iowa rather than sending them to another state. If Iowans diversify their crops and begin growing more fruits and vegetables, Jones added that Iowa could grow its own food for its own residents rather than import the majority of what Iowans eat. He said he would commit $10 million annually to growing food in Iowa for Iowans to eat.

Diversifying crops comes with additional labor needs, Jones said, and farmers would need “certainty on labor” if they were to make this kind of transition. He said the “big effort to send people back to their home countries” from the federal government is harming the potential workforce in this area.

“These are people that could help repopulate rural Iowa, they can provide labor for fruit and vegetable farmers. They want to do these jobs, right? A lot of these people that come from other countries, they have agricultural backgrounds,” Jones said. “This is the work that they want to do, and so we need policy that’s going to make labor available to these sorts of farmers.”

Jones said he’d like to see practices like fall tillage and fall anhydrous ammonia application reduced or done away with through restrictions or taxes on the practices, as they aren’t necessary and can cause problems like increased soil erosion and nutrient loss.

Another topic impacting Iowa’s water and land is data centers, which Jones responded to an audience question about by saying he wants to see at least a one-year moratorium on data center construction in the state.

Iowa land should be used for its “highest use,” he said, which he identified as growing food. He said restoring small livestock production and meat processing in rural Iowa would be a better way to bring in jobs than building data centers.

“If we want more farmers, if we want more young farmers, if we want these vegetable crops and these other diverse crops, if we want cattle on pasture, we can’t have data centers, you know, gobbling up all this land,” Jones said.

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