Ep. 342 Gubernatorial Candidate Eddie Andrews
Iowa state representative and gubernatorial candidate Eddie Andrews joins Nicolas and Kent for one of the most candid political conversations the Prairie Farm Podcast has had. Andrews is a republican who represents a blue district in the Des Moines metro — without party backing — and has a record of bucking the system when it matters. The conversation covers water quality, Iowa's alarming pediatric cancer rate, school choice, regenerative agriculture, soil health, and what meaningful leadership in the statehouse actually looks like. If you care about where Iowa is headed, this one's worth your time.
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Rob Sand (00:00.386)
Hey, this is Rob Sand, Iowa State Auditor running for governor. And this is the Prairie Farm Podcast.
Nicolas Lirio (00:08.398)
Rob, we really, really appreciate you being here today. You do a lot of things. You help keep our state audited. You're running for governor and close to our hearts or specifically for everyone listens close to Kent's heart. Yeah, you're a bow hunter.
Rob Sand (00:22.872)
Yes, grew up bow hunting a little bit with my dad. We were talking about that earlier. He's red green color blind, so not the easiest activity for him.
Nicolas Lirio (00:34.604)
Why was he going? Just loved it or?
Rob Sand (00:36.634)
Yeah, no he got into it He grew up fishing a lot and spending a ton of time outdoors And I actually think that he might be I should talk to him about this, but he might be a first-generation bow hunter, okay? He got me into it and we hunted and I didn't when I was a kid feel a tag But I took the bow hunter safety education course and we spent a lot of time outdoors and did some squirrel hunting too and lots of fishing so and then Really got back into it
well over a decade ago. I do the urban season in Des Moines. very good. Which is a lot of fun. been probably, actually I bet I've been doing that for close to 16 years now. And I can't even tell you the story. You should leave this in the podcast, but there's a story that I'm not even gonna tell you.
Kent Boucher (01:18.062)
sketchy recoveries.
Rob Sand (01:33.966)
It's a great program because most people in Des Moines are pretty regular Iowans. They're sick of deer eating their hostas and they understand that it's more expensive to hit one with your car than it is to have a bow hunter take care of it. So I've been doing that for a long time and then I'll do my regular deer season, my bow tag, either up in Winneshee County around Decorah, my hometown, or oftentimes go down to Madison County. My wife's always got some land down there, shorter drive.
Yeah, and then I do I typically do first season shotgun with a group out in Coon Rapids area. very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I suppose I do And I've done turkey here and there But with shotgun, I don't have the patience to sit out there with a bow for turkey Yeah, just for a sensitive as they are for movement. Yeah, like I'd rather just point a shotgun and so if you make it go bang
Nicolas Lirio (02:11.147)
You make it around.
Kent Boucher (02:30.06)
Some people say turkey heads were made to be shot with a shotgun.
Nicolas Lirio (02:35.278)
I can't believe you would say, don't have the patience for, and then say, but I love to bow hunt, white tail.
Rob Sand (02:41.068)
It's weird. There's a piece of it to me. Maybe I use up all of my patience in the fall season for bow hunting. I've also, like, I know you can get both tags and you could be sitting out there maybe thinking about filling a fall tag for turkey. I've just never done it. Yeah. Interesting. That's a possibility. yeah, I just feel differently about it.
Nicolas Lirio (03:06.83)
Okay. I'm going to transition us because unfortunately we're a little time constrained, but it's a perfect transition. Uh, you're saying you're willing to have a little more patience for a little better payoff. I won't lie to you. Nothing in the world sounds worse to me than running for governor. Like for me personally, like I think that would be so terrible. But, and I know there's a lot of pain involved. What possible reward are you seeing or what pain, why are you willing to go through this pain?
Rob Sand (03:31.726)
Look a couple reasons. I mean the biggest reason to me is just like I've been so blessed in every different aspect of my life if I was using my life just to further my own means I feel like that would be a waste of the gifts. I've been given My faith is really important to me. I think we're called to love other people and serve other people I think it'd be embarrassment to my faith if everything that God gave me I was wasting on myself and so my time my energy my effort the state is in a
I think a very bad position right now. mean, literally, you know, we have the worst rated economy in the country. 49th, if you want to take the numbers from the Trump administration. Yeah, we are number one in growth for cancer. And the legislature has been using their time to gut the auditor's office ability to find misspent money. Like, that's where their priorities are.
Nicolas Lirio (04:13.486)
You've never seen that stat.
Nicolas Lirio (04:26.584)
And then they claim they're behind Doge
Rob Sand (04:29.622)
I just, look at this and I'm like, okay, that's enough. You know, like we need to break it up. It's been 10 years of one party control. Everybody knows the phrase, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely. And now we know in Iowa that takes 10 years. If you're going after our ability to find misspent money on behalf of taxpayers while our economy is literally going into the ditch, you're doing it wrong. And so to me, look,
Iowans have gotten to know me over my last two statewide campaigns. We've got the best job approval numbers in the state, I think, because people understand we're actually doing a job, not doing politics. And I think that's what we need more of. I'm not particularly excited about either party. I always say, you know, I was a registered independent when I first registered to vote, but I picked my poison, because you have to to vote in a primary in Iowa, but it's still poison. And we should talk about the fact that it's still poison. It makes no sense to me that we have to pick one of two.
parties to belong to.
Nicolas Lirio (05:30.454)
We're totally with you and bernay brown for anyone who doesn't know that is look her up. She's fantastic She has a chapter in her in one of her books called quit the bullshit and she says she's like look I'm a registered Democrat, but I really want to own my guns and people that doesn't compute with people because we're so You know, we're so isolated to whatever
Kent Boucher (05:49.933)
Yeah, right.
Rob Sand (05:50.766)
Exactly. That's really interesting to me. I'm going to talk to my sister about that. She's super into Brene Brown. She's great. I've heard the name from her. I haven't read any of her books.
Nicolas Lirio (05:54.958)
I really like it.
Yeah, you know I could she has the number one the most watched TED talk of all time or did for a long time. Yeah, she's good at what she does
Rob Sand (06:07.404)
Yeah, just, people don't fit into boxes. The people who run both parties are desperate to make everybody think that everybody fits in a box. Right? All of you people over here get in a box. All those people over there, they're in a box. But that's not true. I mean, I think I'm good example of that, right? If you went up to somebody in Iowa and you said, okay, there's a guy who is born and raised in a small town whose faith is very important to them, who owns guns, including handguns, and who likes to hunt and fish, which party is he in? They'd all say Republican, but that's me.
And the idea that it only benefits the people running the party to accept the idea that people have to fit in one box or another. I just think it's killing us. Because we can't talk to each other. Raise your hand if some of your family get togethers have gotten more awkward in the last 15
Kent Boucher (06:57.642)
It's always caused by
Nicolas Lirio (07:03.086)
got family that listen to this, I ain't saying nothing.
Rob Sand (07:05.998)
I'm sorry about that.
Kent Boucher (07:07.694)
You mentioned cancer, the cancer rate in Iowa. That's something we've talked about ad nauseam on this podcast. Just how that is a trait of being an Iowan right now. We know people who are suffering from cancer. We know people who have passed away from cancer. Sometimes I wonder how many of our listeners will be diagnosed with cancer someday that are Iowans.
Governor Reynolds pledged a million dollars to digging into what's the cause of this. I think the hardest part is, we're a conservation agriculture based podcast, it's the main thing we focus on. Correlation is not causation of course, but I oftentimes wonder if, even if you had all the money to spend on it, would we really be willing to pull back all the curtains?
because we're afraid of what it would reveal as to what are the primary causes of this.
Rob Sand (08:14.002)
Number one problem that we have right there I think is trust, right? And I do think, I think if people can find a way to do this that they trusted, they would say, yeah, pull back all the curtains, let's figure it out, right? And I think that's true of people in any industry. They want to know, they believe in what they're doing. People believe in what they get up and go to do at work every day. But they also want to know, and most people who believe in it, they say, no, I know this is good and so I want...
you dig into it so you can validate it, right? That's like the purpose of an auditor, right? Most people, their attitude is, yeah, come in, do the audit, tell everybody what a great job we're doing. The truth about this right now is what I think is frustrating, a million dollars is a mouse fart. That's not gonna figure anything out. That is a million dollars of taxpayer money getting paid out so that she can say, we put a million dollars into this. It's not gonna give us any answers.
And here's the other piece of this. I think there's a lot of people on the left who want to blame agriculture. But correlation is not causation. We need to have really robust data. And we need to be looking at everything. I literally this morning went around our house and looked at a couple more radon tests. So when we bought the house, we installed a radon mitigation system. I then did more testing. The numbers were down.
but I wanna see if we can get them lower. another entity came out, put a bigger fan on the system, and now the numbers are lower again. Like how much of this is radon? How much of it is smoking? How much of it is drinking? We should be wanting to dig into this. And here's the other piece of this. This is money well spent. This is investment. Right, because think of the cost of treating cancer. Figuring out what the answers are and doing something about it is gonna save a lot of money for taxpayers in the long run.
Nicolas Lirio (10:09.25)
Man, spoken like a true auditor. Well, yes, I'll move to something that is more closely able to be caused, not just correlated. I have done several episodes and done a lot of research and interviews on Iowa's water quality from the CEO at Des Moines Water Works to USDA employees, the state geologist. You just don't get away from the water quality is caused by agricultural practices, not ag, not farming in general, just the way that we've
Rob Sand (10:11.715)
Yeah.
Nicolas Lirio (10:38.392)
kind of decided we're going to do ag. And here's where it gets tricky. And I understand we're a little bit playing with fire, but it seems to be it's the way that water quality is now, or we have to mess with someone's pocketbook. What do you, how do you even start to address them?
Rob Sand (10:55.994)
I just and that's again that framing you're right that that's typically the way people think about it. It's so short-sighted. Yeah I Think most producers most farmers they work really hard to do the right thing a lot of conservation practices are expensive And so they look at them and they're like, well, I'd love to do that. Where'd I get the resources to do it? Yeah, right. I just read a fascinating article in
National Geographic about the impact of beavers on water quality. There's so many different things that we could be doing that we're not thinking about. Whether that's improving wetlands, which also adds good opportunities for hunting. There's a lot of good flyways in Iowa where we could have a great duck hunting tourist program where we could be bringing people in.
and those wetlands at the same time would be doing a lot to improve water quality. So there's lots of win-wins out there, but the posture, again, we were just talking about this before we started this conversation, or maybe it was in this conversation. But again, this goes down to like, okay, there's a two-party system, and so rather than solving problems, a lot of people just wanna yell at the other side because they feel like this is oppositional. It's supposed to be collaborative.
And you're supposed to be able to look at the situation and be like, what can we do that we know is going to have a positive impact that we can all agree is a good thing to do? And you just don't see enough of that. I think we need to be focused much more on looking at ways to improve the situation that don't have to be win-loss, they can be win-win.
Nicolas Lirio (12:37.014)
Love it. Love it. Well, I know we're getting shorter on time, but Dad has a question that he's been watching for for decades and it is pretty tricky. Dad.
Carroll Hoksbergen (12:50.702)
Well, I guess, you know, as if you become governor, what do you think about agriculture today? Is it going to keep growing the way it is or we need more specialty crop growers or people who more diverse rather than mega farms getting bigger and bigger? And seems like right now the mega farmers are winning out and they're getting bigger and taking up all the ground. And yeah, me as
Being a third generation farmer, getting ready to move on and try to pass the farm on. I guess over the years, there's never been any subsidies available for specialty crops or anything like that, where we do things for conservation. And it seemed like the big farmer would just kind of run off with all of
Rob Sand (13:28.622)
Mm-hmm.
Carroll Hoksbergen (13:47.978)
I want to know your feelings on what do you think the future of agriculture should be?
Rob Sand (13:52.994)
Well, the future of agriculture is going to be diverse, right? But for it to be diverse, we need to be making sure that we're supporting every piece of it that needs support. And you're right, we put way too much support into the big guys that are already doing fine.
Carroll Hoksbergen (14:09.578)
and they're not really diverse other than corn soybeans.
Rob Sand (14:13.242)
Correct, but I would also say this again. There's I think a lot of folks on the left who like to yell about Monoculture and you know they can be very anti-ethanol You know if you like Iowa public schools You should probably want the price of corn to go up right Anything that we're gonna do is going to inherently impact every piece of the state of Iowa because we are an agricultural state
We have 25 % of the world's grade A farmland. We will be an agricultural state, right? We wanna make sure we're doing things right and that we're growing. But we also, I think, we need to have stability too. There's a lot of people out there who call for overarching, super rapid change in what's going on right now. I don't think that that's a smart approach. I think we need to have stability. And this goes back to what Mr. Berland taught us and...
10th grade English class or 10th grade biology class in Decora, diversity brings stability, right? I do think that we should be doing more to support smaller scale farms for a number of reasons, Regenerative agriculture is one way to do that. There's a lot of places where we can improve profitability for farmers by making sure that we're giving them access to these carbon markets, right? Whether that's in California or it's somewhere else, we can be a part of that solution.
We in Iowa. Here's the other piece. The big farms are so big that you talk about generational change and handoffs. How do you get into farming these days? It's so hard to do because they've gotten so large. And if we're not doing anything to support smaller scale farmers, then nobody can get to the point where they could take on a bigger farm. And here's the other piece of this to me that I think fundamentally comes from just growing up in small town, Iowa.
Carroll Hoksbergen (15:45.643)
Exactly.
Rob Sand (16:06.924)
We also need to acknowledge that agriculture is a way of life. It is not just a business. And there are people who want to be out there farming the same way that you and I want to be out there bow hunting.
It is strange that I can talk about the patience that I don't have to do bow for Turkey and then also spend hours upon hours out there with a bow for deer to fill three or four tags every single year. I connect to it for bow hunting for deer in a way that I don't for bow hunting for Turkey. There are a lot of people who want to farm. They grew up on a farm. They grew up near a farm.
It's the lifestyle, it's the way of life. And we need to be doing more, I think, to support those folks actually getting out on the farm. Because the more we have that too, the better shape our smaller towns and our rural areas are gonna be in. then they're gonna drive into town to get their hair cut, they're gonna drive into town to go to the grocery store. But if we don't have those folks living out there in those rural areas, those small towns suffer too. So again,
When I say I want to be a governor for all, like, I reject the idea that this is somebody's fault, right? We are all in this world right now together. None of us picked where we were going to be born or who we were going to be born to. We only have a little bit of impact on our paths, right? A lot of what we do is ended up determined by what we see when we're younger. And we need to take all the people who are here right now and actually put our heads together and work on solving the problems as opposed to just assigning blame and yelling at each other.
Kent Boucher (17:51.694)
Yeah, you touched on something that we also wanted to talk about. It's touted the looming land transfer. Yeah, yes. think our average age of landowners in Iowa is something like 68 years old or something. And so as those people pass away, and we've already seen this in our lifetimes, where you know,
You know you're from Iowa when your family talks about the farmland they used to It has centralized more and more, fewer landowners, fewer owner-operator farms.
I wholeheartedly agree with what you said there as far as people want to be a part of the farming lifestyle, but it's just so hard to get into it. Do you have any suggestions for ways that the state could maybe assist in that so that as we go through this upcoming huge shift in who's owning the land, that a good catchphrase is keep Iowa lands in Iowa hands, and it's not just absentee landowners, investor owners.
Rob Sand (18:59.362)
Private equity firm.
Kent Boucher (19:00.404)
Yeah, even people from other countries running farmland and isles.
Rob Sand (19:03.724)
No, I think that is important. I think we've got a program going on already that tries to match aspiring farmers or folks that want to be farming with people who are ready to hand it off. That's a good thing that we're doing. If we're doing that, I'm pretty sure we are, we? You know the name of it? Yeah, yeah. I know I've heard about it. We should be doing that. We should be doing more of it. This is a place where I'm mostly open to listening to solutions. I'm not necessarily in everything in this race.
I'm gonna bring ideas when we're a heck of a lot closer to Election Day I'll be saying with much more specificity on all kinds of issues You know, here's the best ideas that I've heard from across the state of Iowa for how to solve this problem But a piece of this is just acknowledging that it's a problem. Yeah, right And I do think you're right. I think having people who are owner operators who are there, you know They're gonna take better care of it They're gonna be more concerned and focus on soil health and keeping that soil for the long run, right?
Right? And if they're doing that, then our water quality is going to be better too. Again, win-win. Yeah.
Nicolas Lirio (20:05.558)
Absolutely. Man. Well, so before we end, I want to thank you for giving us your time and for being willing to run. I don't have very long, but we would love to hear from you. You were the only Democrat that had a state held office. And it seemed like a lot of people did not like that. I'd love to hear about your time as state auditor and how that.
Rob Sand (20:33.13)
Yeah, Look, so I spent seven years as the chief public corruption prosecutor prior. The Iowa Film Office tax credit scandal prosecuted those criminal cases. The guy that rigged all those lottery jackpots uncovered that whole scheme and prosecuted him. Came into the auditor's office saying, we're going to wake up the watchdog. I want to be assertive. Because the only good auditor worth having is one who people are actually slightly worried about. Right? Yeah.
And there's two stories from my first year in the office that I will take to my grave knowing that we were doing a good job. One was a guy who's, he's a Republican, he's in local elected office and he's a state employee. And he said, I've never seen more middle managers worried about what the state auditor might think. Perfect. That's what we want, right? The story here. Yeah, accountability.
It's the same thing as when, where do you, where do your eyes go when you're driving on the road and you realize there's a cop right behind you. Rear view mirror. Yeah. Spedometer, right? You're like, what am I doing? Like, how am I doing? Am I doing everything right? you want to have an auditor that where is in the rear view mirror that people know is going to look. There was another story about a guy who told a former coworker of mine. Yeah. You know, we used to make these purchases at the state agency I worked for. They were technically illegal, but we didn't think they were such a big deal.
We quit doing them because it seems like the new state auditor is more willing to call us out for that. Wow. I'm like, yes. That's crazy. Yes, I am. I appreciate that. The problem was, so we found a record amount of misspent money. We started a government efficiency program, so good that the Republican state auditor of Mississippi copied it. Wow. But after finding a record amount of misspent money, the response to that in Des Moines was, we got to stop this guy.
Nicolas Lirio (22:18.125)
Why?
Rob Sand (22:19.822)
Because they're serving insiders and special interest groups. That's the only answer. Because they have forgotten the purpose of all of this. have forgotten if they got in for the right reasons, they have forgotten why. And they have decided, no, what we want more than anything else is not to be accountable for when bad things happen. That's the only explanation for this. And listen, I'm serious when I say there's no two sides to this. Every government accountability entity that weighed in on this said, do not do this.
The guy who was US Comptroller General under George W. Bush for almost his entire presidency said, you should not pass this bill. The American Institute of CPAs, which literally writes the standards for how audits work, said, you should not pass this bill. It's going to lead to an increase in waste fraud and abuse. So did the Institute of Internal Auditors. They did it because they don't want people to know what's happening with your tax dollars, and we were serious about telling you. That's it.
And that to me is like the number one reason why at the end of the day it's like, well, I'm going to run for governor because why would I work really hard campaigning for a year to keep a job where I can't do much for Iowans anymore, you know?
Nicolas Lirio (23:29.334)
Yeah, you saw the inside and said, let's make a little change here. And yeah, we love it. Well, Rob, we really, really appreciate that you are willing to, as your your Instagram bio says, not a politician, but a servant of the people that you are willing to go out and try and serve. We appreciate that you gave us some time today. And everyone, when you're out voting, I mean, for all of our lists that are in Iowa and for anyone who's out voting 2026 in November, conservation is a huge issue. I'm the first to say it shouldn't be the only, but it should be a big one that you're thinking about.
Make sure you're staying tuned in and just like you vote with your dollar, make sure you're actually showing up and voting with your vote. And as we know here, conservation happens just one mind at a time
