Francis Thicke runs for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture

    Francis Thicke wants to protect Iowa?s air and water while restoring competition to the state?s agricultural markets. Thicke is a Democrat who is running for Secretary of Agriculture, a position held by Republican Bill Northey since 2006.

    Thicke and his wife Susan own and operate a grass-based, organic dairy near Fairfield. He has been a farmer for 27 years and has a Ph.D. in agronomy/soil fertility. He has been involved in the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission and the Iowa Food Policy Council. He once worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., where he was the national program leader for soil science.

    Thicke said the main role of the secretary of agriculture is to provide leadership, vision and dialogue with Iowans about the future of agriculture. 

    ?Iowa agriculture is facing some major challenges that we?re not prepared to meet,? he said. ?We also have some great opportunities that we?re not taking advantage of.?

    One of the issues Thicke wants to tackle is the profits from biofuels and who receives them.

    ?We need to keep those profits in the pockets of farmers and not in corporate coffers,? he said. ?When some of the ethanol plants went bankrupt, they were bought up by out-of-state oil refineries. Now the profits are being extracted out of the community. The next generation of energy systems should be farmer-controlled, so the farmers keep the wealth that is created.?

    Thicke said the state should protect its investment in biofuels. He said he will encourage Congress to renew the federal subsidies for ethanol and biodiesel.

    ?When the biodiesel tax credits disappeared, the whole industry started to shut down,? he remarked.

    While Thicke wants to support existing ethanol plants, he said the state has built too many of them. He said the state should not subsidize future corn ethanol plants, but instead should search for the other forms of energy.  

    ?We?ve seen ethanol plants go bankrupt in the last couple of years,? he said. ?Let?s not dig the hole deeper. Economists told us we built too many. Instead of building more ethanol plants, let?s take the resources we have and develop the next generation of energy, which can power agriculture and which is truly sustainable.?

    An example of the next generation of energy suppliers Thicke has in mind is the use of perennial crops such as switch grass.

    ?Perennial crops produce 10 times less soil erosion than corn or soybeans,? he said. ?Since farming began in Iowa, we?ve lost about half our top soil. If we put perennials on the landscape, we would begin to rebuild our soils. The perennial plants require much less or hardly any pesticides, and their energy yield is greater.?

For the full story, see our Oct. 4 print edition.