Bernie Sanders Endorsement
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Senator Bernie Sanders Endorses Career Scientist Chris Jones for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture and Land Stewardship
Jones is challenging incumbent Mike Naig, a former Monsanto lobbyist.
Iowa City, Iowa — September 24, 2026 — Today, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed Chris Jones, a career research scientist and water quality expert, as Iowa’s next Secretary of Agriculture.
Sanders’s endorsement echoes Jones’s call to take on Big Ag’s corporate monopolies. Jones is challenging two-term incumbent Mike Naig, a former Monsanto lobbyist, on his record on Iowa’s poor water quality, growing cancer crisis, and failing farm profitability.
“Under Trump and Republican control, Iowa’s cancer rates have soared, family farmers have gone out of business, and corporate ag monopolies have continued polluting rivers, lakes and streams,” Sanders said. “The cost: Iowans are now drinking some of the dirtiest water in the nation and paying the ultimate price with the second-highest rate of new cancers in the country.”
Jones, a first-time candidate who launched his campaign in January, welcomed the endorsement.
“As a career research scientist and longtime Democrat, I am proud to have Senator Sanders’s support,” Jones said. “Bernie Sanders has spent his entire life standing up to corporate corruption, and the damage that corruption does is on full display in Iowa’s water quality and cancer crisis.”
Sanders’s endorsement puts a national spotlight on the harm caused by industrial ag monopolies, which a growing number of Iowa voters are linking to falling farm incomes, the state’s water quality and cancer crises, and shrinking opportunities in small towns.
During this election cycle, water quality has become a bipartisan concern in Iowa. A recent poll by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future found that 75% of Democrats, 62% of independents, and 54% of Republicans in the state are concerned about the quality of their tap water at home. The issue has also become central to this year’s races for governor and Congress.
Naig, whose campaign donors include many responsible for and complicit in the pollution, has already begun running ads statewide and heavily in the Des Moines metro region, Iowa’s economic and population center, home to the state capital, and a fast-growing ring of suburbs.
Central Iowa’s drinking water comes largely from the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, which drain some of the most intensively farmed land in the country. High nitrate levels in those rivers forced the region’s first-ever lawn watering bans in 2025 and 2026, and nitrate and pesticide runoff have drawn growing scrutiny as possible contributors to the state’s rising cancer rates.
Jones spent his career as a water quality specialist and helped design and deploy the state’s water quality monitoring network, which helps keep Iowans’ drinking water safe but has been repeatedly underfunded by the Republican-led legislature and governor’s office.
Sanders concluded his endorsement:
“Chris Jones, a research scientist and water quality expert, has the courage to clean up Iowa’s dangerously polluted drinking water and stand up to Big Agriculture. He will work with everyday Iowans to put clean water front and center at the Iowa Department of Agriculture, and he’ll fight for family farmers so they can earn a decent living while protecting our environment. I’m proud to endorse Chris Jones for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture.”
— Senator Bernie Sanders
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About Chris Jones:
Chris Jones is a research scientist, author, and one of Iowa’s leading water quality experts who has spent more than 40 years advocating for clean water and sustainable agricultural practices across the state.
During his career, Jones managed the water quality testing laboratory at Des Moines Water Works for eight years, helping oversee operations at one of the world’s largest nitrate removal facilities built to address Iowa’s agricultural runoff crisis. He also spent four years as an environmental scientist at the Iowa Soybean Association, where he helped deploy some of the state’s first independent water quality monitoring systems.
At the University of Iowa, Jones worked as a research engineer and helped develop Iowa’s first real-time public water quality sensor network, giving Iowans unprecedented access to information about the health of their rivers and streams.
In 2023, Jones published The Swine Republic: Struggles With the Truth About Agriculture and Water Quality, which the Library of Congress selected as Iowa’s representative at the 2024 National Book Festival. In 2024, he also helped found Driftless Water Defenders, a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the waters of northeast Iowa’s Driftless area.
