Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey’s nomination to a position in the U-S-D-A cleared the committee level in the U-S Senate last week, but he isn’t sure when the final step will take place. “I’ve kind of given up making predictions, we are a step closer but still need that full Senate approval. So we’ll see when that happens — it could happen in the short term or it certainly could be awhile yet,” Northey says. Northey says he continues to work at his current job and is doing what he can to prepare when the final approval comes. “As we think about getting folks ready — whoever that next secretary is — we make sure that we have all the documents that help that next secretary learn what the department is doing to make that transition really easy,” Northey says. “We have great folks at the department. I am very blessed to have folks who know what they are doing, do a great job.”

Northey was nominated on September 1st to become the U-S-D-A Undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation. He’s been waiting for the process to take its course since then. “It does seem like it is getting closer. It’s getting a little more real now as a possibility — but again — I don’t know if that’s months away are days away,” according to Northey.

Northey became Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture in 2007.

(Radio Iowa)

Former Iowa Farm Bureau president Craig Lang has filed the paperwork to launch a campaign for state ag secretary. Lang, a Republican, says several months ago he told Governor Kim Reynolds he intended to run if current Ag Secretary Bill Northey resigned. Reynolds will name Northey’s replacement soon after Northey’s wins Senate confirmation for his new federal job.

“I don’t anticipate Governor Reynolds would appoint me, period, so I’ve made the decision,” Lang says. “As soon as Bill is voted affirmatively in the US Senate, I’m going to start my campaign.” That means Lang will likely face a G-O-P primary in 2018 against the governor’s choice for state ag secretary. Lang says he wants to spark a statewide conversation about diversity in agriculture, rather than relying primarily on corn and soybean production.

“We’ve spent so much time trying to develop that infrastructure, and it’s a great infrastructure. There’s none other like it in the world, but it’s not the infrastructure that’s going to support growth of a rural community,” Lang says, “because a rural community needs higher value products directly to the consumer.”

Lang says alternative crops can boost the rural economy and give more young people a reason to live in rural Iowa. Lang, who is 66 years old, farms with his two sons, a brother and his 91-year-old father. “We milk around 650 cows three times a day. We have a small cow-calf operation with about 50 cows and calves and we farm around 1200 acres,” Lang says. “We have corn, soybeans, alfalfa, pasture and cover crops.”

The milk from their farm near Brooklyn is sold to a dairy in Newton where Maytag Blue Cheese is made. Lang’s family plants cover crops on soybean ground and in fields right after corn silage is harvested. Six-hundred thousand acres of Iowa farmland is seeded with cover crops today. Lang says, as state ag secretary, he’d like to set a goal of having cover crops on five MILLION acres.

“We can improve the water quality of the state,” Lang says. “We can retain the nitrogen and the phosphorus because of less erosion.” And Lang says the science now shows soil health improves when cover plants like rye are used and it improves the yields from traditional crops planted on the same ground. Lang was the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation’s president from 2001 through 2011.

He also served as president of the board that governs the state universities, but Democrats in the Iowa Senate refused to reconfirm Lang to that post after the conflict about the Tom Harkin Institute for Public Policy at Iowa State University. The institute is now located at Drake University.

(Radio Iowa)