There’s a lot at stake in the 2010 mid-term elections. Democrats are biting their nails over the House and Senate races; Grist is highlighting the 37 governorships that are up for grabs. In this picture, the contest for secretary of agriculture in Iowa might seem a tad obscure to non-Iowans — especially if you, like most people, would have trouble naming your own state’s Ag Sec.

But Iowa is the big kahuna when it comes to farming, producing a fifth of the nation’s corn, a sixth of its soy, 30 percent of its hogs, and 12 percent of its eggs. It’s also the second-largest recipient of federal farming subsidies, and currently in the news for the recall of half a billion salmonella-tainted eggs. If challenger Francis Thicke (pronounced “TICK-ee”) manages to unseat incumbent agriculture secretary Bill Northey, it would be a huge win not only for sustainable agriculture in Iowa, but the nation. And it would send a clear message to Congress as lobbyists and activists begin putting on their battle overalls for the next Farm Bill.

“To the extent that the ‘farm bloc’ is shown to be much less unified in its resistance to change, the more likely that change is to come in Washington,” Michael Pollan, food-system journalist and UC Berkeley professor, tells me by email. (Pollan and — in a surreal twist — filmmaker David Lynch are judges in a contest to make a music video for the brain-colonizing song “Happy Cow” that will be used in Thicke’s campaign.) “As the scandal over Jack DeCoster’s egg ‘farm’ demonstrated, Iowans are deeply divided over the industrialization of their agriculture,” he continues. “The triumph of a reform candidate like Francis Thicke would demonstrate to Washington that a change in agricultural policy would in fact be welcome in much of the farm belt, and that legislators who purport to represent farm states by simply blocking reform more closely reflect the interests of agribusiness than that of their own constituents.”

Thicke is a blue-ribbon reform candidate, a combination of down-to-earth Iowa dairyman and professorial, statistics-spouting visionary. He’s been a full-time farmer 27 years, running what’s now a 450-acre farm with 80 cows that he and his wife, Susan, got certified organic in 1993. After a B.A. in music and philosophy, he went back to work on the family farm, then a decade later got a PhD in agronomy/soil fertility; at one point he was the USDA’s National Program Leader for Soil Science. He’s served on the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission and the Iowa Food Policy Council at the appointment of then-governor Tom Vilsack (now the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture), and on the Iowa Organic Standards Board. He’s won several awards for sustainable agriculture and land stewardship.

And he’s written a really interesting book, A New Vision for Iowa Food and Agriculture, with chapters on how the industrial revolution became industrial agriculture, how factory farms differ from family farms, and what’s wrong with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs — another area Iowa dominates, to the dismay of those manure-spewing hog-factories’ neighbors. There’s a whole section in which he wonks out on biofuels and alternatives to ethanol — “although it can’t be confirmed, Thicke is likely the only candidate in Iowa at least who has a chapter in his campaign platform on ‘pyrolysis,’ or the process of heating biomass in the absence of oxygen to produce combustible fuel,” teased the Des Moines-Register.