How Iowa ag secretary hopeful John Norwood has a plan to make Iowa the Silicon Valley of ag with sustainability in mind
Iowa Secretary of Agriculture candidate John Norwood, a Des Moines Democrat, wants to make ag hip again.
During a visit to Burlington this week, during which he attended the Des Moines County Democrats' annual banquet, Norwood shared with The Hawk Eye a vision for the future of Iowa's ag sector that includes farm parks, crop and farmer diversification, soil and water conservation, and education that he believes will draw more people to rural Iowa and encourage healthier farming practices.
"If Silicon Valley is the place that all the technology people from around the world want to go to ... let's make Iowa the agricultural hub," Norwood said Wednesday during an interview with The Hawk Eye while enjoying a beverage at the Beancounter Coffeehouse and Drinkery. "And not just for commodity production, but for all of the cool stuff, the emerging food tech and other kinds of food-related products that we can do at smaller scale."
Norwood is a Polk County soil and water commissioner and the founder of TBL Ventures, a Des Moines-based company that advises businesses on environment, social and governance issues. He holds a master's degree from Yale's Forestry School and a bachelor's degree from Williams College in Massachusetts. Before moving to Iowa in the early 2000s, he lived in California, where he led an agricultural land trust in grape, nut and cattle ranching and worked closely with growers, ranchers, and city and county planners to increase the irrigated ag base while protecting farmland from development.
He announced his candidacy to unseat Republican Mike Naig in February.
Naig won that seat in 2018 against Democrat Tim Gannon after Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed him to the job earlier that year after Bill Northey stepped down to take a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Prior to that, Naig served five years as deputy agriculture secretary under Northey.
The secretary of agriculture heads the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, which is responsible for managing land and helping farmers in the state.
"We call it the Department of Agriculture, but it's also the Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship," Norwood said. "There's a land stewardship part of this that's really been forgotten."
Is it time to look at life after ethanol?
Stewardship in a state whose major crop loses two pounds of soil per pound of corn produced was a frequent theme throughout Norwood's conversation with The Hawk Eye.
According to IowaCorn.org, 57 % of the corn grown in Iowa goes toward producing 27% of all American ethanol, while 33% goes directly to livestock feed.
Norwood acknowledged that corn is important, as are soybeans, but said that amid changing market trends, the time has come to consider other potential crops.
Data from the Energy Information Administration estimates electric vehicles will comprise only 20% of the nation's light-duty vehicle fleet by 2050, but Norwood thinks the transition from combustion to electric engines will happen sooner.
He likened electrification of vehicles to smart phones and pointed to the rate of electric car sales.
"Nobody had this technology in 2007, and now almost everybody has it. That's 15 years later," he said. "Electrification of these vehicles is going to happen a lot more quickly than people think ... You look at what's happening in with electrification in California now with Elon (Musk) and Tesla, new car sales are 10% fully electric. In this country, it's about 6% now. In the world, it's about 8%, and the rate of doubling is what you have to watch. That curve, the rate of acceleration of that curve, the compounding is about every 12 to 24 months we're doubling the rate, and Tesla just passed a million cars annually.
"What's going to happen with all this ethanol? Well, I think some of it, what we need to do is there are parts of the economy that are harder to electrify, and those include marine and aviation and our railroads."
While those markets could keep ethanol going for awhile, Norwood largely views ethanol as a transitional fuel.
"We need to begin to think about life after ethanol," he said.
While Iowa's soil is ideal for growing corn and beans, he noted, the state's duopolist farming practices are not ideal for soil or the organic matter in it.
"I have people tell me all the time ... this is the best place in the world to grow corn and beans, and that's really all we should do. Well, Afghanistan is a great place to grow poppies and Columbia's a great place to grow coca, but do we then draw the conclusion that's all we want to do," he said. "If growing these two crops here in Iowa starts to have all of these negative externalities — the water pollution, the soil loss, we lose 10 times the amount of soil that we produce each year — that's not sustainable. If all we're thinking about is how much corn we can grow and for how long, in 100 years, we might not have any soil left, because corn is a hard crop on the soil. For every pound of corn we grow, we send two pounds of soil down the river."
Instead, he said, there are opportunities to diversify, such as with oats, winter rye, pollinator habitat, cover crops, indoor farming, wetland and flood mitigation.
"Corn and soybeans are super important," he said. "If we have 100 acres, we probably should be growing for the foreseeable future 80 to 85 acres corn and soybeans, but guess what, for the other 25 acres, we ought to be doing other things."
Getting people on board
Asked how he would get farmers on the same page when it comes to sustainable farming in a system that has been set up to encourage unsustainable practices, Norwood said it will be largely dependent upon education and bridging disconnect between land owners, farm operators and the new generation of farmers.
Of Iowa's about 23 million acres of farmland, 60% is absentee owned. By including all involved parties rather than going through just the operator — the concept of which has been met with scoffs aplenty during his time on the soil and conservation commission — emerging knowledge can be shared to allow for cohesive discussions and decisions.
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"Change is hard, and part of it's cultural and part of it's educational," he said. "I took my soils class in 1992 and learned some of those principals and isn't it interesting that almost 30 years later, we're still learning some of this basic biology of the soil ... We haven't figured out how to think about the resources and the productive capacity of the land from a systems perspective. We're learning more about how ecosystems perform. The web, the interconnections. If you just start messing with one piece of the pile of sticks and you start pulling them, the pile will pull apart."
He also emphasized the importance of the ag secretary and governor working together to impact the direction and speed of the economy and the health of Iowans and the ag system. Norwood said he is confident that he will be able to work with the governor regardless of her political party to create actionable strategies by focusing solely on the issues.
"We're all Iowans," he said.
Keeping government at the local level
Norwood is a self-described Tip O'Neill-style Democrat, a term inspired by Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, a House speaker who said "All politics is local."
Throughout his time as a soil and water commissioner, he said he has experienced frustration with what he described as Iowa's top-down approach to ag and conservation.
"In Iowa, all agriculture is local and all conservation is local, so to have this top-down-style mindset that the state's going to come in and tell everybody what to do, that doesn't work," he said. "(Local governments) know that ground the best."
It was through his work on the Polk County Soil and Water Commission that the county was able to create a scalable strategy for saturated buffers allowing for recent delivery of 50 of the structures. Previous practices, Norwood said, were delivering one buffer at a time.
Saturated buffers consist of a set of perforated pipe running within a buffer strip, allowing water that flows from drain tile to be filtered through grass and vegetation, effectively filtering out nitrates, rather than allowing that runoff to go directly into a stream or ditch.
He also spoke favorably of establishing more Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program wetlands, which also remove nitrates and improve biodiversity.
Farm parks and smaller-scale farming
Norwood also wants to make farming a more inclusive an attainable profession that doesn't require large acreages to be successful.
One way to accomplish this, he said, would be with farm parks, similar to industrial parks in that they would be focused on generating economic activity, creating jobs and accelerating community growth, but with ag.
"The purpose of the farm park is to drive this resiliency and diversification and to welcome these hippy farmers and others from around the world and this country who want to come and farm and maybe do it at a smaller scale," Norwood said. "They don't have millions of dollars to go out and buy ground so they rent ground."
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Counties could design their own according to their community's wants and needs. They could include a worker village and/or daycare, and a market where renters could sell their locally grown produce. It also could consist entirely of ag land. It would be up to each county.
"We'll know we're on the right path when the next generation wants to go back to rural Iowa or come to rural Iowa to work and raise a family and so forth," he said.
Norwood referenced a recent visit to River Root Farms in Decorah, which consists of a three-acre model using hoop houses.
There, he learned the biggest barriers faced by smaller-operation farmers are access to land and support, as well as the infrastructure needed to get the food grown from the farm to the consumer. That infrastructure, Norwood said, largely has gone by the wayside with commodity farming.
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"A lot of that infrastructure got blown out because we went all in to the commodity side of things," Norwood said. "We lost the expertise and we lost the infrastructure for the food side of things, and that's what we need to fix. We need to reintroduce that."
He also spoke favorably of using locally grown food to feed school children on free- or reduced-price lunch plans and said the supply chain issues caused by the pandemic have emphasized the need for local food sources.
"That's an economic development strategy to feed all these school kids," Norwood said.
Making Iowa's agricultural industry more inclusive also would help to grow the state's population in rural areas.
"If they want to get into agriculture, we should help them do that. That's how we'll grow the state," he said. "Let's figure out some strategies where we can get the next generation to want to live in rural Iowa. You've got 99 choices. Let's make it fun and cool and hip and high-quality life."
Michaele Niehaus covers business, development, environment and agriculture for The Hawk Eye. She can be reached at mniehaus@thehawkeye.com.
This article originally appeared on The Hawk Eye: John Norwood wants to make Iowa's ag scene hip, fun and sustainable
