Norwood on the Democratic ticket for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture

“I think we need a new vision for Iowa agriculture that builds on the tremendous productivity of the system we have,” said Polk County Soil and Water Commissioner John Norwood, who is running for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture as a Democrat. “I’m a solutions guys. I don’t want to just point out all the problems without identifying what the strategies are,” Norwood said.
Norwood said if Iowa were its own country, it would be a top 10 producer of the world. Therefore he said it needs a secretary of agriculture who can execute and build scalable systems, because the 23 million acres in Iowa is a very large system.
“There is only one state that beats us in terms of their ag economy and that is California, which has 40 million people where we have 3.2 million people. California is also three times the size of Iowa geographically,” Norwood explained. “We are extremely productive, but our system is out of balance. We need to add the concepts of resiliency, diversity and inclusiveness if we’re going to have a truly sustainable system.”
Norwood was born and raised in Massachusetts on one of the original farming communities in the country, part of what was then the Sudbury Plantation, founded in 1638.
After graduating from college, Norwood worked for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority in the capital engineering department regarding water. He then obtained his master’s in agriculture from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, now known as the Yale School of the Environment.
Norwood also ran an agricultural land trust in California and briefly worked with the Secretary of Resources of California. He has lived in Iowa since 2002 and was elected as the Polk County soil and water commissioner in 2017.
“I am really passionate about agriculture and the management of our lands and waters,” Norwood said. “I have a really good window of what is working and what isn’t working in our present system. I realize I can only do so much at the county level as a county commissioner. There are many good things about Iowa but we want to build it to last, which is the theme of my campaign.”
One issue Norwood would like to tackle is polluted waters. He explained one billion pounds of nitrogen on average each year flows down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, creating a hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico as well as hypoxic zones across Iowa.
“Saylorville Lake becomes hypoxic in the summer months, growing algae that produces toxins that float down the Des Moines River. That is a problem.”
He continued to say there are 700 impacted bodies of water in the state, a list that continues to get longer, not shorter.
A second issue, said Norwood, is that Iowa has lost one-third of the topsoil, sending 10 times the rate of topsoil down the river than what is produced.
“The department of agriculture has been an obstruction in some of the things we’ve wanted to do. They just aren’t moving quick enough,” Norwood said.  “Water quality is a huge issue; it’s close to a crisis and the soil loss, if we don’t change some of the things we are doing in the next 50 years we may have severely degraded soils in many places in Iowa and that’s not fair for future generations. We can’t squander the resource because we’re making a lot of money today and not really thinking about tomorrow.”
Norwood’s vision for Iowa agriculture “builds on our tremendous commodity productivity,” but also addresses the “missing pieces” of resiliency, diversity, and sustainability.
 “As the Secretary of Agriculture, it’s not the secretary of just the corn, beans and hogs. It’s the secretary of food, land and water,” Norwood said. “We need, fundamentally, a different approach.”
Norwood has ideas to engage new farmers: promote small organic farms and specialty farms, urban farming concepts, and even “a farm park” in each county where new farmers could get access to land, capital, and labor -- diversified farms which can be profitable on a small number of acres.
Growing up on the east coast, living on the west coast for 10 years and having been in Iowa the past 20 plus years gives Norwood a unique perspective of the Hawkeye state, he said.
“The Iowans I have met want to have a legacy; it’s a people that are both humble and proud of the state they live in. We want to pass things on to where they are at least as good as what we got, if it’s not better.”