Meet the Candidate Challenging Iowa’s Most Sacred Cow: Ethanol

A retired water scientist named Chris Jones is running in the Democratic primary for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. That may not sound like a blockbuster race. But Jones is an unusual candidate: It’s rare for anyone on the ballot in Iowa to be so critical of the state’s total commitment to the ethanol industry. If Jones receives even slightly more support than expected in the primary, it may show that the chokehold that a powerful ethanol bloc has had on farm politics for more than 20 years is finally loosening.

Iowa’s water is heavily polluted, and agriculture is responsible. Excess quantities of nitrogen fertilizers and astonishing quantities of manure are sprayed on crops. When they wash out of the soil and into rivers and streams, nitrate—the fertilizing nutrient that plants are meant to take up—seeps into the water supply, along with traces of agrochemicals ubiquitiously coated on seeds and doused on plants. This is a toxic combination; nitrates and pesticides in drinking water are each implicated in Iowa’s climbing cancer rates. Add in E. coli and other bacteria from manure, which combine with excess fertilizer to generate algal blooms in the state’s rivers and lakes, and it’s no surprise that water quality is a constant struggle. All summer, state beaches are regularly closed to swimming. The state’s major water utility maintains a costly emergency nitrate removal system, which has even been running this winter after a historic peak this summer.

Chris Jones doesn’t pull punches. The causes of this crisis, he says, are a lapse in federal laws that required water-conscious farming, irresponsible disposal of the state’s overwhelming superabundance of manure produced by factory farms, a better-safe-than-sorry culture of overuse of synthetic fertilizer, and a general commitment to growing corn on every square inch of land that will support it.

As a research engineer funded by the state legislature, it was Jones’s job to turn data from a statewide water-quality sensor network into scientific insights. He published research but also felt a responsibility to explain to the public what the data showed, and why nothing was getting better. While his humble blog on the university website became influential, politicians defunded the system of sensors he drew from. Jones told press that he’d heard the blog was being used as a threat against the rest of the program’s existence, and retired. This was 2023. He now blogs on Substack to a subscriber base of over 5,000—modest in the grand scheme of things but impressive for chart-heavy pieces focused on ag reform. His 2023 book The Swine Republic: Struggles With the Truth About Agriculture and Water Quality also exceeded expectations, garnering coverage in the Des Moines Register for its surprising three printings under a month after its release.

One of Jones’s most controversial arguments is that ethanol, a notorious third-rail topic in farm country, has to be phased out in order for water quality to be restored. Ethanol is shorthand for a usually corn-derived biofuel. The industry was marginal until 2005, when the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency mandated oil refineries blend a minimum ratio of ethanol into U.S. gasoline. Production grew meteorically. About half of Iowa’s corn now gets made into ethanol. This means that half of the production of the most productive corn state, on untold acres of some of the highest-yielding farmland in the world, is burned in cars—an oddity that is only possible because of federal policy. In our food system, there’s abundance, there’s waste, and there’s ethanol, which is the perfect encapsulation of the horror of both.

Jones wants Iowans to rethink the state’s reliance on ethanol. The biofuel’s environmental benefit, he notes, is questionable at best. In terms of jobs and growth, the refineries don’t pay sufficient dividends. And because the ethanol market props up the price of corn, it holds together a system that incentivizes all-out production—meaning copious applications of fertilizer and pesticide, farming right up to the banks of local creeks and rivers—at the direct expense of water quality.

But Iowa corn growers don’t stake their livelihood on what happens to the commodity after it leaves the grain elevator—they care about the price. And ethanol, a law-ordained industry that burns corn far more efficiently than anyone can eat it, absorbs a huge portion of supply. Without this outlet, we would be left with the unmistakable reality that there’s too much goddamn corn, and there has been for a long time. The specter of millions of bushels of grain with insufficient demand is the scariest ghost in Iowa, and it haunts lobbyists and senators relentlessly.

On the other hand, if you can topple the ethanol narrative, then you’ve got a good start on remaking the system completely. With a thoughtful transition, eventually you could start growing food again, and introduce incentives that make for soil- and water-friendly farming. This is the basic proposal that Jones presented in a Facebook reel posted by the campaign. The comments—245 of them and counting, on an unremarkable campaign post for a primary race for minor state office—are notable for their volume alone. Their tone is mixed to negative. The typical knee-jerk is present (“Why is he anti Ethanol? He is Lying, we need Ethanol!”), along with other alarmist rebuttals that the corn market would tank if ethanol were to disappear overnight. (Jones is campaigning for a “strategic retreat,” not an immediate ban.) The assent, not all of which is enthusiastic, comes from many corners, forming no coherent voice—which might be to Jones’s advantage, if an ethanol-critical platform winds up uniting people of varying backgrounds and political allegiances. More than anything, Iowans seem to want to talk about ethanol, for or against it—and Jones’s is the only campaign that is willing to make the conversation interesting.

As long-shot campaigns go, this one has the makings of an overachiever. Jones has already built himself a high profile as a dissident. His tour stops around the state in the coldest period of a frigid winter—I’ve seen such stops in presidential primary season produce single-digit attendances—seem to be drawing a respectable number of supporters. The small but mighty progressive media voices in Iowa love him, and the grassroots are going to give everything they have. The other advantage his campaign wields is that he’s a genuinely new voice. His focus on clean water doesn’t put farmers front and center or cater to them directly. He’s running on environmental outcomes first, with a message of shared prosperity instead of promising to build farm wealth and hope that it trickles down. In Iowa politics, this approach is unprecedented.

At its most practical, the campaign advocates proposals that Jones has argued for all along—that farmers should be required to make basic, specific adjustments to their practices to prevent the ruination of the state’s water supply. Simply making the case that farmers should be regulated is spicy stuff in Iowa.

Jones isn’t running, however, for an office that can actually enact these policies. The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, or IDALS, cannot make state law. It funds modest, piecemeal water and soil conservation projects. Weather and crop information, along with food and animal safety, are the large part of its duties. Real change lies in the state legislature, which has sweeping power to transform the industry, particularly through the state Department of Natural Resources, which can punish polluters, regulate farming practices, and limit industrial agricultural development. Only federal power can undo the ethanol mandate. Jones says he’s “realistic” about the possibilities of winning the race and is clear-eyed about the limits of the position, but affirms that until the substantive discussion changes, nothing will.

Should Jones win the primary, his Republican opponent will be the former Monsanto lobbyist and incumbent two-term Secretary Mike Naig, who has already commented on Jones’s candidacy, “I think you could say he hates ag, he hates farmers, and he intends to increase regulation and cost.” Meanwhile Jones’s Democratic primary opponent, Wade Dooley, sounds like the many moderates that come before him, running on a bingo card of buzzwords with few specifics, let alone plans for accountability. Dooley offers a “practical, results-focused approach,” pledging to “measure what works” while “working across differences.” Jones, by contrast, says: “Corporations public and private have stripped the wealth from Iowa and continue to do so, and they leave us with pollution and cancer. Iowa’s political leaders have helped them do it. So have the liberal elite.”

If Jones breaks out in this campaign, it will likely follow a pattern similar to Zohran Mamdani’s in New York City. Both cases are characterized by a dual-party establishment that has locked itself into positions characterized by vacuous shibboleths that sound credible to a general public until one day they don’t. The establishment parties have gotten used to silencing alternative viewpoints with fear and hatemongering, while for many on the ground, the status quo has become increasingly contradictory and oppressive. At some point, the shibboleths start to sound delusional and the once-taboo arguments seem like the voice of reason. The right voice enters at the right time, and the dam breaks.

It’s hard to say whether Chris Jones will be the right voice at the right time. It’s easy to predict that he won’t be the state’s next agriculture secretary. But for a long time Iowa voters have had no other choices. Eventually, something as contradictory and damaging as ethanol has to be overcome by a new common sense.