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........

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