By Michael Schaffer - Managing editor
Daily Iowegian
CENTERVILLE —
Even agriculture is political.
Democrat Francis Thicke, 59, of Jefferson County, is challenging Republican incumbent Bill Northey to be Iowa's next secretary of agriculture.
During a stop in Centerville Tuesday, Thicke said he wasn't a political person, having served only on the township level. Thicke said he was "far more a scientist" but decided to run because agriculture in Iowa is facing big challenges.
"And I think that we're not even looking, even recognizing these challenges," he said. "And we're not looking to the solutions."
Northey is more concerned with the status quo — corn, corn ethanol, commodity crops and cheap oil.
"In his mind, cheap oil is going to last forever, I think," he said. "But I think that's not the case and we need to be proactive and look for how we're going to make Iowa agriculture profitable and how we can thrive in the era without cheap oil. So it's going to get very expensive to be able to carry on this kind of agriculture."
Don't throw row crops out with the bath water, but Iowa farmers should be looking at planting diversity and rotational farming, he said. Planting perennial cover crops that replenish nitrogen back into the soil, which also deals with extreme weather events occurring in Iowa.
"And so that's another reason why we should have more diversity in the landscape and more perennial cover on the landscape," he said. "So these two things, energy and extreme weather events, I think are things that should cause us to think more about how we're going to make the landscape more resilient and energy efficient."
Thicke said his message has been well-received.
"It's very favorable. People are very excited," he said. "I think people haven't thought about this. We're producing ethanol, but ethanol is for cars going down the highway. We're not doing anything to secure the energy future for agriculture."
Farmers today can make decisions based on knowledge learned through the years rather than rely on energy to do all the work, Thicke said. And when oil reaches record prices, farmers will have no choice.
"We need to become more energy self-sufficient in agriculture," he said. "If you look at agriculture anywhere, it's very obvious, that it's dependent on cheap oil. And we are at the end of the cheap oil era. We just haven't realized it yet."
Thicke mentioned a few ways Iowa farmers can become more energy-efficient:
• Create energy systems — like mid-sized wind turbines on the farm — so farmers can harvest their own energy and actually profit and then break even from the sale of excess wind energy production.
• Produce biofuels on a local scale, or perhaps at the coop level, where farmers have access to energy to power farming operations. This allows Iowa farmers to retain the value created by the process.
• Produce foods on a local scale, which allows communities to retain more money. And locally produced foods provide "food security."
Even if oil stays at $60 per barrel for the next 30 years, Thicke said changes need to be made to improve the environment, create jobs and create local wealth.
"So our economy is really capped by energy," he said. "So if we can become energy self-sufficient, then our economy can continue to go."
Thicke and his wife Susan own and operate an 80-cow dairy farm on 450 acres near Fairfield. They have no children.
"Our farms a little unique, too, in that it's a grass-based dairy," he said. "And it's split up into about 60 small pastures, or paddocks. And so we rotate the cows after each milking twice a day the cows go to new grass. Then we can control where they're grazing and it increases the productivity of the pasture and it helps build the soils and better nutritional quality for the animals."
Thicke said this style of grazing is some what new for dairy farming in Iowa, but something being done in Wisconsin.
"In Wisconsin, probably 25 percent of the dairy farms are grazing dairy farms now," he said. "And there are a number in Iowa."
Grazing farms are more energy efficient than the traditional farming method of raising, harvesting and hauling feed to the animals, he said. And the farmer doesn't have to deal with the manure, because the animal does it for him.
"If you design the farm right, all we have to do is open the gate to the next pasture, the cows go in there, close the gate," he said. "They harvest their own feed, they spread their own manure where it needs to be and it's a healthy environment."
A centerpiece of Thicke's campaign for Iowa's secretary of agriculture is his recently published book, "A New Vision for Food and Agriculture: Agriculture After The Oil Crash." For more information about Thicke's campaign, go to www.thickeforagriculture.com.
Thicke earned a PhD. from the University of Illinois in agronomy with a specialty in soil fertility. He has been farming full-time for 27 years.
