Cornfields to the campaign trail

Editor’s note: The following is a profile of Democratic candidate for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Tim Gannon. The campaign for incumbent Ag secretary Mike Naig did not respond to the Newton Daily New’s calls to participate in a pre-election profile.

On a windy, day gray mid-October day, Tim Gannon takes a break from campaigning to get some work done on his family farm near Mingo. The combines sit idle as the steady, unseasonable rains kept the Democrat running for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture out of the fields and underneath a grain auger, getting the conveyor ready for the eventual bumper crop of corn that the Gannons will haul in from their 950 acres.

The farm has been in his family for generations. He works the land with his father, Bill Gannon, and fellow farmer Ross Wasson, while selling crop insurance on the side. Their family farm extends to Ira to the northwest, along the Chichaqua Valley Trail and Indian Creek. The Casey Gannon Softball Field in Mingo is named after his grandfather, a clear sign of the Gannon family’s impact on the community.

Gannon is a commuter, living in Des Moines with his wife Liz and infant daughter Lucy. He said the drive to the Mingo farm is about 35 minutes “door to door.”

“I work the farm as needed and as I’m able,” Gannon said.

A Colfax-Mingo alumni, class of 1995, Gannon was a high school athlete, playing football, track, basketball and cross country. Gannon still holds a couple of school records on the track, but he took a more permanent trophy — so to speak — from the baseball diamond.

Clearly excited to tell the story, Gannon came out from underneath the auger and took off his work glove to reveal a thumb bent in the wrong direction.

“I broke my thumb sliding into home. It’s still a little crooked. That was the end of my not-very-good baseball career,” Gannon laughed. “The doctor was like, ‘well, if it were a few more degrees we’d have to surgically correct it, but it will just be a good story for the rest of your life.’”

After a day of maintenance in the soggy cornfields, Gannon was headed back to the campaign trail, smiling and waving to parade crowds in Iowa City, during his Alma mater the University of Iowa’s homecoming parade. A six-top, two-day tour across extreme eastern Iowa followed.

For Gannon, politics runs in the family. Both his mother and father, Gannon said, were politically active when he was a child. Bill Gannon served in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1965-1971, including a term as the Democratic House Minority Leader. Gannon said his father Bill took him to meet presidential, gubernatorial and statehouse candidates as their campaigns came through Jasper County.

“I did some door knocking when I was young. I was active,” Gannon said.

As a college senior, Gannon had the chance to work for former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack’s 1998 campaign. The Mingo native then worked as a Democratic political operative when he had the chance to serve under Vilsack again at USDA in Washington, D.C. for eight years working for farmers on risk management.

“While I was there, the cousin who farmed with dad died kind of unexpectedly, so over the last couple of years I was in D.C., I knew I wanted to come back here and do what I could to help him,” Gannon said.

It’s his status as an active farmer the Gannon campaign is using to differentiate himself from his Republican opponent, current Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig. Although, the incumbent and former agro-business professional Naig maintains he’s still active in his family’s Cylinder farm in northwest Iowa.

Gannon hopes to unseat Naig in Tuesday’s election, who was promoted from deputy Ag-secretary in 2017 by Gov. Kim Reynolds after former-Iowa Ag secretary Bill Northey resigned to serve as an undersecretary of agriculture in the Trump Administration.

Watching his dad work at the Van Wall Equipment John Deere store he owned in Colfax, Gannon said, taught him who Iowa’s economy is directly linked to agriculture farm profitability. As secretary of agriculture, Gannon wants to focus on parity between the opportunities Iowa’s small towns larger cities. “If farmers aren’t doing well, a whole bunch of other folks in rural Iowa aren’t doing well,” he said.

“I think there’s a little disconnect in Washington not realizing in what they’ve done in trade and biofuels policy is pushing prices down and keeping prices down,” Gannon said. “We’ve seen lower farm income five of the last six years. We’re kind of to the point where we can’t afford that.”

On the Farm Bill, which Congress let expire in September without a replacement, Gannon blames Republicans lawmakers, in both 2014 and 2018, for making legislation that once had cross-party appeal become a bipartisan bill. Gannon does believe Congress has time to get something done before next year.

“It’s disappointing they let it expire and didn’t get their work done,” he said. “With the farm economy that we have, having a farm bill is important for agriculture to know what the safety net is going to look like and how it’s going to impact families operations.”

Gannon said it’s the rural development programs in the bill which impact drinking and wastewater, programs that build firehouses and obtain police and EMS services for small towns, and SNAP (food stamps) that make the farm bill important for more than just the Ag community.

“SNAP always become something that we fight over, but that’s important to farmers. When people are able to afford food, no enough of it ends up in farmer’s pockets but that money does make it to farmers, eventually,” Gannon said.

After the auger was ready to take the next load of grain into the towering aluminum grain bin, Gannon climbs into his pickup and drove into the fields toward a John Deere combine. He unloaded his grease gun and started servicing the green beast in a freshly-harvested cornfield.

Reaching into the combine underbelly, Gannon said, despite his tough talk against the Republican majority, to a certain degree, Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture position transcends politics.

“Agriculture is not a Democrat or Republican thing,” Gannon said. “Agriculture is important to our state from an identity perspective, also from how important it is to our economy. You need someone in there who’s going to be fighting for the party in power in Washington, D.C. no matter who the governor is. If you’ve gotta stand up for Iowa farmers, you have to stand up for Iowa farmers. That’s something that’s not happening all the time right now with low prices and damage done to Iowa’s economy.”

A good example, Gannon said, is Ethanol markets. President Trump announced at a rally in Council Bluffs in October he is instructing the EPA allow the sale of year-round E-15 ethanol blended gasoline nationwide. This previously violated the agency’s emission standards. Gannon, like most Iowa politicians, supports the move because it will create more sales opportunities for Iowa corn producers.

But Gannon argues Naig and other Iowa Republicans have not put enough pressure on administration officials to do this sooner or draft the rule in a more timely manner. According to a news release on Oct. 1, EPA will not adopt the rules until spring 2019. Gannon worries the E-15 bump will not help farmers, who will be sitting on a lot of grain due to decreasing international trade markets caused by higher tariffs in the president’s trade war with China and other countries, until the next fiscal year.

“That means it may not do us any good come June 1 next year, one of the deadlines we have coming up,” Gannon said. “They need to get it done in a timely manner so the gas station owners and convenience store owners who would want to offer that year-round sale can make the investments in the infrastructure they need in new pumps and new tanks to sell that higher blend of ethanol. ... Selling a higher blend of ethanol would be very positive for us, but I don’t think we’re going to see any of the benefits in that any time within the next year. ... Republican officials haven’t been holding the administration officials to account for (Trump’s) bad policy for Iowa Agriculture.”

For Gannon, the E-15 rule is just a start. The Mingo Democrat doesn’t see year-round E-15 making up for the entirety in lost trade markets, but he also thinks EPA’s waiver system is favoring oil refiners, which Gannon argues hurts bio-diesel refiners and farmers in Iowa.

Iowa Republicans in Congress and at the statehouse, Gannon argues, should have put more pressure on the White House to work with other countries like Japan, Mexico and the European Union who take issues with China’s business practices, instead of taking the unilateral approach.

“The demand for ethanol has been impacted by 2.2 million gallons over the last couple of years. If that were put back into the market, that would be about a billion bushels of corn,” Gannon said. “That would have a tremendous impact on the prices farmers are looking at right now.”

Election day is Tuesday.

Contact Mike Mendenhall at 641-792-3121 Ext 6530 or at mmendenhall@newtondailynews.com.