For 25 years, Dan Brown has instructed his students at Ellsworth Community College in the business of agriculture.

Now he’s campaigning for a bigger classroom — the state of Iowa.

Brown, the Republican mayor of Iowa Falls, is running for Iowa secretary of agriculture against state Sen. Patty Judge, D-Albia.

At Ellsworth, Brown is the head of the farm management department, which includes classes in marketing, farm records analysis and accounting.

“We are helping young men and women to be successful in production agriculture,” he said. “I’m teaching by day, and then I’m on the road [campaigning] at night and on the weekends.”

Brown foresees a more involved role for the secretary of agriculture if he is elected.

“The Iowa Department of Agriculture has been noticeably absent from a lot of activities,” he said. “We need to be a leader most of the time, a cooperator some of the time and a catalyst in others.”

The hot-button agricultural issue around the state in recent years has been hog-lot regulation.

Brown supports both state environmental regulations and state siting control, but he thinks land-use policy will be more important in the months following November’s general election.

He outlined three competing concepts that need to be balanced in order for policy to succeed: the right to farm, private property rights and quality of life.

Brown said the right to farm was put in danger when the Iowa Supreme Court struck down the nuisance-suit protection law last month.

This protection shielded farmers from neighbors — and others — who would have sued over what they saw as annoying farming methods. Now, Brown said, farmers both large and small will be left wide-open to court action.

“[A farmer] can’t just shut the combine off at 7 o’ clock at night because you’re going to have a dinner party on your lawn,” he said, citing one Illinois farmer who was sued for tilling his 200 acres late at night.

“It can happen on any size farm,” Brown said. “These are very real concerns.”