Francis Thicke, Democratic candidate for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, has a vision for the future of agriculture.

His vision focuses on sustainability, specifically alternative energy and soil retention.

Thicke said society is too dependent on fossil fuels. Ethanol, a source of alternative energy, is focused on powering automobiles, not agriculture.

“We really have virtually no plans to power agriculture beyond fossil fuels,” Thicke said.

To solve this problem, Thicke suggests making use of the wind. Thicke said Iowa has the most wind of any state in the U.S. If farmers put mid-sized wind turbines on their farms, they could harvest the wind and distribute it locally, he said.

“We need to see how we can keep the profits locally and in the pockets of farmers, because increasingly, farmers have been losing the profit of agriculture,” Thicke said.

Corporations are stealing those profits from the farmers because of the markets, he said. Many of the markets are acting more like monopolies than a free market.

“We need some change,” Thicke said. “We need some Teddy Roosevelt-style trust-busting to break up these markets.”

Another alternative source of energy Iowans need to focus on is biofuel, Thicke said.

Thicke believes biofuels are a better source of energy for agriculture than ethanol.

“Let’s stop putting state money into building new corn-ethanol plants,” Thicke said. “Let’s take that money, instead, and put it into biofuels.”

Thicke said pyrolysis is part of the next generation of biofuels.

Pyrolysis is a process that allows fuel to be made from any biomass, even garbage. Thicke said perennial crops would be the best plants to use, since they protect the soil from erosion and nutrient loss.

One of the benefits of this source of energy is that it can be produced on small farms.

“This is a very exciting possibility, how we can make agriculture energy self-sufficient in the future,” Thicke said.

Besides focusing on alternative energy, Thicke also wants to find ways to conserve Iowa’s soil.

Thicke said Iowa is losing topsoil and organic matter 10 times faster than the depleted soil is being renewed.

A solution to this, he said, is to put the livestock back on the land to promote the natural process of soil renewal through ecology.

“We tend to think [that] the more we farm, the more we compromise the environment … but we can actually — if we use the model of ecology — we can actually enhance the environment the more we farm,” Thicke said.