Iowa Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

NINETY-FIRST GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF IOWA Second Regular Session

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SENATE/HOUSE FILE ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

CONCERNING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A STATE PROGRAM FOR FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE TO ENSURE THE MATERIAL SECURITY OF ALL IOWA RESIDENTS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ADDING NEW SECTIONS TO IOWA CODE CHAPTERS 15 AND 159, MAKING APPROPRIATIONS, AND PROVIDING EFFECTIVE DATES.

A BILL FOR AN ACT

LONG TITLE

AN ACT RELATING TO THE CREATION OF THE IOWA FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ESTABLISHING THE IOWA FOOD ASSURANCE PROGRAM BY ADDING NEW SECTIONS TO IOWA CODE CHAPTER 159; CREATING THE IOWA ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM BY ADDING NEW SECTIONS TO IOWA CODE CHAPTER 15; MAKING APPROPRIATIONS; AND PROVIDING FOR EFFECTIVE DATES AND IMPLEMENTATION SCHEDULES.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

Iowa does not have a citizen ballot initiative process. Iowa is among 26 states without citizen-initiated statewide ballot measures (Ballotpedia; Cedar Rapids Gazette, September 30, 2024). This legislation can only advance through the General Assembly.

FILING: A citizen cannot file a bill directly. A sympathetic legislator must sponsor and introduce the bill as a Senate File (S.F.) or House File (H.F.). Alternatively, a standing committee may introduce it. Only legislators and committees may sponsor bills in the Iowa General Assembly (Iowa Legislature, "How a Bill Becomes a Law").

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: Upon introduction, the presiding officer (President of the Senate or Speaker of the House) assigns the bill to a standing committee. As a food and commodity assurance measure, this bill would likely be assigned to the Senate Agriculture Committee or the House Agriculture Committee. Because the bill carries an appropriation, it may also be referred to an Appropriations Committee or the Agriculture and Natural Resources appropriations subcommittee.

FUNNEL DEADLINES: The Iowa Legislature employs a "funnel" system requiring bills to pass through committee by specified dates or be effectively dead for that session. The first funnel typically requires bills to pass out of a full committee; the second funnel requires passage by the opposite chamber's committee. Bills must advance through these deadlines to remain viable. Appropriations bills are exempt from funnel deadlines.

FISCAL NOTE: The Legislative Services Agency (LSA) prepares fiscal notes for all bills with budgetary impact. This bill will require a fiscal note analyzing the appropriation.

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber (26 of 50 Senators; 51 of 100 Representatives). Governor's signature or veto override (two-thirds of each chamber).

SESSION: The 91st General Assembly (2025-2026). Iowa legislative sessions typically convene in January and adjourn by late April or May, though special sessions may extend or be called.

HISTORY: A version of this proposal was first developed in 2016 through the Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation (SMRF), the first non-partisan political trade school in the United States, registered with the Colorado Department of Higher Education, Division of Private Occupational Schools (DPOS). The original proposal was sidelined during the 2016-2017 legislative cycle. The present version incorporates updated research from the Historical Apoplexy series (Cooper, 2025-2026), a ten-paper academic work providing the evidentiary foundation for this legislation.

LEGISLATIVE DECLARATION

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Iowa:

SECTION 1. Legislative findings and declaration.

(1) The General Assembly hereby finds, determines, and declares that:

FINDINGS RELATING TO THE STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE FOR STATE ACTION:

(a0) Twenty-two federal government shutdowns since 1976, including a forty-three-day shutdown in 2025, the longest in United States history, which furloughed approximately 670,000 federal employees. The House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 members since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929; each member now represents approximately 762,000 constituents, the worst representation ratio in the OECD. Senate cloture motions, 49 in total between 1917 and 1970, now exceed 2,000 per decade. Federal H.R. 1 (2025) shifted SNAP administrative costs from fifty percent to seventy-five percent state share. The federal machine is structurally overloaded (Cooper, Paper VII, 2026). Iowa has the authority to act under its own legislative power rather than await federal action that structural overload prevents;

(a0a) THE MULTI-EXECUTIVE PRECEDENT. A single overloaded executive is not the only available design. The Swiss Federal Council has operated as a seven-member collegial executive with a rotating one-year presidency since 1848, one hundred seventy-eight years of continuous constitutional government, and reports citizen trust above eighty percent. The Roman Republic placed executive authority in two consuls, each able to check the other, for 482 years. Shared and bounded executive authority is the older and better-tested design; the single-point overload documented above is the deviation from the historical norm, not the norm itself;

(a2) UNIVERSE 25 REBUTTAL. The Calhoun mouse experiment ("Universe 25") is frequently invoked against any abundance-distribution proposal. The argument is a misread. Calhoun's mice collapsed not because they had abundance, but because abundance arrived without institutional infrastructure: food, water, nesting material, and space, with no education, no governance, no intergenerational transmission, no civic role. Abundance of resources plus abundance of ease produces Universe 25. Abundance of resources plus structured civic obligation produces the Augustus annona (400 years), the Defense Commissary (159 years), and the Mabu Co settlement (800 years). The Roman grain dole was distributed to citizens who had civic obligations: military service, public works, jury duty, voting. The commissary is distributed to military families inside an institution that defines daily structure. The institutional scaffolding is what distinguishes sustainable abundance from collapse. Camp Dodge (Iowa Army National Guard headquarters) operates this template on Iowa soil today, and Iowa's own agricultural system, which produced enough food in 2023 to feed the equivalent of more than seventeen million people against a state population of approximately three million two hundred thousand, is itself an existence proof that institutional scaffolding around abundance is operational in this state;

(a1) DENIAL IS NO LONGER NEUTRAL. Inaction by a legislature possessing the authority, capacity, and documented need to act constitutes active harm. The burden rests on denial;

FINDINGS RELATING TO FOOD AND COMMODITY INSECURITY:

(a) The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, in "Household Food Security in the United States in 2023" (December 2025), reported that 13.5 percent of United States households experienced food insecurity and 5.1 percent experienced very low food security. For Iowa specifically, Feeding America's Map the Meal Gap estimates that approximately 11 percent of Iowans, roughly one in nine, and approximately 15 percent of Iowa children, roughly one in six, face food insecurity;

(b) Iowa is consistently ranked first in the United States in corn, hog, and egg production, and second in soybean production behind Illinois, and it ranks among the highest of all states in total agricultural production (USDA NASS, 2024 State Agriculture Overview for Iowa). In 2022, Iowa generated approximately $46.6 billion in agricultural cash receipts; in 2023, approximately $38.75 billion. Iowa's agricultural production capacity feeds a population equivalent to more than 17 million people, while Iowa's own population is approximately 3.24 million, a ratio of more than five to one. The state that feeds the nation cannot feed itself. Food insecurity in Iowa is a distribution problem, not a production problem;

(c) As of fiscal year 2025, approximately 264,500 Iowans, or 8.2 percent of the state's population, receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (USAFacts, 2025), administered under Iowa Code section 234.12 and Iowa Administrative Code Chapter 441-65;

(d) The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service Food Dollar Series establishes that the farm share of the United States food dollar is 24.3 cents, with the remaining 75.7 cents allocated to processing, transportation, wholesale, retail, and food service markup. Total United States food-at-home spending is approximately $1.09 trillion; production cost is approximately $213 to $327 billion. The difference of approximately $496 billion represents markup above production cost. Iowa farmers produce the food; Iowa consumers pay four times production cost to access it;

(e) The cost to close the food insecurity gap for all 47.9 million food-insecure Americans is approximately $32 billion, which represents 6.5 percent of the $496 billion markup between production cost and retail price (Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," 2025);

(f) The United States military commissary system, established by the Military Commissary Act of 1867 and now codified at 10 U.S.C. Section 2484, has operated at-cost food distribution continuously for one hundred fifty-nine (159) years through 236 stores worldwide with approximately $4 billion in annual sales, delivering savings of 17 to 25 percent below civilian retail prices in CONUS (up to 64 percent overseas) to approximately 2.8 million authorized users. Annual federal appropriation: approximately $1.3 billion, drawn from all federal taxpayers, including the more than 330 million civilians denied access. This program establishes a proven precedent for government-operated at-cost food distribution;

(g) The geographer Albrecht Penck calculated in 1925 that Earth's carrying capacity was eight billion people using 1920s agricultural technology. The current world population is approximately eight billion. Since agricultural technology has advanced substantially beyond 1920s capacity, scarcity of food is not a physical constraint but a distribution and policy constraint (Penck, 1925; Cohen, "How Many People Can the Earth Support?," 1995);

(h) The United States possesses approximately 293,000 manufacturing establishments (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024). A single medium-sized factory (200,000 square feet, 200 employees, operating 24/7) can supply basic consumer goods for 10,000 to 50,000 people. The calculated requirement for universal material abundance for 335 million Americans is 10,000 to 15,000 facilities, representing a ratio of 19.5 to 29.3 times overcapacity, with United States manufacturing currently operating at approximately 77 percent capacity utilization, 23 percent idle not due to supply constraints but demand constraints (Federal Reserve; Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," 2025);

(i) Iowa has manufacturing establishments in all 99 counties, with approximately 220,000 workers employed in the manufacturing sector, making it the single largest sector of Iowa's economic output. Food manufacturing alone employs 59,546 Iowans at an average annual wage of $61,049. Iowa's manufacturing diversity spans food processing, agricultural equipment, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and industrial components (Iowa Workforce Development, Iowa Manufacturing Industry Profile; CIRAS, Iowa State University);

(j) In 2024, 7,325 retail store locations closed in the United States, the highest annual total since 2020, with closures projected to roughly double in 2025 (Coresight Research). More than 54 million Americans live in food deserts. Iowa's rural food deserts are expanding as commercial grocery stores close in small communities across the state's 99 counties (Iowa House File 1032, 2025 session, proposing support for rural grocery stores). The commercial retail grocery model is collapsing as a distribution system;

(k) The economist John Kenneth Galbraith described in "The Affluent Society" (1958) the condition of "private opulence and public squalor", the coexistence of enormous private productive capacity with inadequate public provision of basic needs. This condition persists in Iowa, where the state's agricultural and manufacturing output vastly exceeds its population's material requirements;

(l) The economist Thorstein Veblen documented in "The Engineers and the Price System" (1921) the deliberate restriction of production capacity by business interests to maintain prices above production cost, a practice he termed the "conscious withdrawal of efficiency." The gap between Iowa's productive capacity and its residents' material security reflects this structural dynamic;

FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

(l1) Augustus Caesar formalized the annona civica, the monthly grain distribution to approximately 200,000 Roman citizens, as civic infrastructure in the same category as roads and aqueducts. Augustus was a documented tyrant. The proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate listed roughly 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians for execution, and Suetonius records him ordering a Roman knight named Pinarius stabbed on the spot for the offense of taking notes at a public assembly. Even Augustus, who would have a man killed for taking notes in the wrong room, understood that hungry citizens are broken infrastructure. The annona operated for more than 400 years;

(l1a) Emperor Nerva expanded the model with the alimenta, a program of low-interest state loans to farmers whose interest payments funded the nutrition of orphaned and destitute children. The accounting survives. The Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia (CIL XI 1147) is the bronze inscription that recorded the loan amounts and the child-support payments; it still exists and can be visited in the Parma museum. The administration of feeding children has been preserved in metal for two thousand years;

(l1b) The premise that sedentary abundance requires industrial technology is itself a forgetting. At Mabu Co on the Tibetan Plateau, a permanent lake-centred settlement was sustained approximately 4,400 years ago at 4,446 metres elevation, an altitude at which most humans cannot function without acclimatization, using fishing hooks and environmental knowledge (Yang et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, September 2024). The settlement persisted roughly 800 years;

(l1c) The principle that distributed small-unit processes edit planetary systems is not theoretical. Approximately 49 million years ago, the freshwater fern Azolla, in symbiosis with the nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium Anabaena, replicated across the Eocene Arctic Ocean and drew down enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to help shift Earth from a hothouse to an icehouse climate over roughly 800,000 years (Brinkhuis et al., Nature 441, 2006);

(l1d) Three independent records converge on one conclusion: feeding a population is infrastructure, not charity. The United States military commissary has run the at-cost model for 159 years. The Roman annona ran it for more than 400 years. Biology has run exponential resource processing across geologic time. The proposition that a state cannot operate at-cost food distribution is refuted by the commissary statute, the Veleia bronze, and the Arctic sediment core alike;

(l2) This act does not place Iowa's farms, processors, or distributors under government ownership. The contrast case is the municipal grocery model associated with Mayor Mamdani of New York City, in which the government owns and operates the store itself. This act does the opposite. Division I contracts with private Iowa producers, processors, and distributors at production cost plus a surcharge not exceeding five percent. Iowa farms stay private. Iowa trucks stay private. Iowa processing plants stay private. The state operates the retail point at cost, the way Costco operates on volume purchasing and near-cost pricing, and the way the Defense Commissary Agency has contracted with private suppliers since 1867 without acquiring a single farm. Currency survives for luxury, custom, and specialty goods. The act provides a floor, not a ceiling, and it does not replace the market economy;

(l3) The retail collapse and autonomous freight are already eliminating distribution jobs. Aurora Innovation operates driverless freight on the Dallas-Houston corridor today, and more than 15,000 retail store closures were projected for 2025. This act does not cause that displacement. It catches the workers the displacement throws off, by holding a material floor under every Iowa resident when a markup-funded retail job disappears. At-cost distribution eliminates the markup, not the labor; the commissary has employed truckers for 159 years. Adam Smith warned in 1776 about exactly this worker, the one whose whole life was spent performing a few simple operations. The sound response is to catch that worker, not to insist the operation will last;

FINDINGS RELATING TO PUBLIC HEALTH: WHY THIS ACT REACHES BEYOND BARE SURVIVAL:

(m) Sir Michael Marmot's Whitehall Studies, commencing in 1967 and continuing to the present with 10,308 subjects, established that among British civil servants with universal healthcare, full employment, and no absolute poverty, the lowest employment grade experienced three times the mortality rate of the highest grade. Standard risk factors, smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure, explained less than forty percent of the mortality gradient. The hierarchy itself, independent of absolute material deprivation, produces lethal health outcomes;

(n) Dr. Robert Sapolsky's thirty-year study of wild baboon populations in the Serengeti demonstrated that subordinate social position produces chronically elevated cortisol, atherosclerosis, immune suppression, and cognitive impairment. When a tuberculosis outbreak eliminated the most aggressive males from a troop, hierarchy collapsed, and subordinates' cortisol levels normalized, demonstrating that the health damage was caused by the hierarchy, not by inherent individual biology (Sapolsky, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers," 1994; "Behave," 2017);

(o) Dr. Carol Shively's thirty-year study of female macaques at Wake Forest University demonstrated that subordinate social status directly causes visceral fat accumulation, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease, with cingulate cortex serotonin identified as the neurological nexus linking depression to cardiovascular disease (Shively, 2009; 2014);

(p) Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, demonstrated that chronic psychological stress shortens telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomal DNA, accelerating cellular aging. Caregivers of chronically ill children had measurably shorter telomeres proportional to years of stress. Poverty and subordination age human beings at the molecular level (Blackburn & Epel, "The Telomere Effect," 2017);

(q) These findings collectively establish that poverty and social hierarchy are not merely economic conditions but medical conditions with documented physiological pathways that produce measurable morbidity and mortality. Food and commodity assurance programs therefore constitute public health interventions with quantifiable healthcare cost reduction potential. Iowa Medicaid covers approximately 600,000 Iowans; the healthcare costs attributable to poverty-induced chronic stress represent a quantifiable burden on the state budget;

(q1) THE GRADIENT IS THE DISEASE. The Whitehall finding is not that poverty is unhealthy. It is that the gap is the gradient, not the deprivation. The British civil servants in the Whitehall studies had universal health coverage, secure employment, and no absolute poverty, and the mortality gradient appeared anyway, tracking rank itself. Treating sickness downstream of an untreated gradient is documented to fail across four research programs, six decades, and three species: civil servants (Marmot), Serengeti baboons (Sapolsky), Wake Forest macaques (Shively), and the cellular telomere studies (Blackburn). Hierarchy itself kills. A food and commodity assurance program reaches a cause that downstream medical treatment cannot;

(q2) Bowles and Gintis named the right disease at the wrong site. In identifying socioeconomic stratification, they were correct; in isolating the school as its engine, they were not. Stratification is the ocean, not the cup. The gradient is the disease; schools, housing, diet, healthcare, employment, and criminal justice are each downstream of it. Hierarchy itself kills, and the gradient runs through every institution. Targeting any single institution misses the structural mechanism. This act treats the gradient at the point a state legislature can reach it, the material floor (Cooper, Paper V, 2025);

(2) The General Assembly further finds that food and commodity assurance is a single, coherent policy purpose. The arithmetic of abundance, the historical and biological precedent, and the public health evidence set out in this section each support the same conclusion: a state that produces food for many times its own population can, at modest cost, place a material floor under every resident. The failure to do so is a policy choice, not a constraint of production. Denial is no longer neutral.

DIVISION I, IOWA FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT

SECTION 2. NEW SECTION. 159.31 Short title.

This division shall be known and may be cited as the "Iowa Food and Commodity Assurance Act."

SECTION 3. NEW SECTION. 159.32 Definitions.

As used in this division, unless the context otherwise requires:

1. "At-cost pricing" means the price of a food product calculated as the sum of the direct production cost paid to the producer or supplier plus a facility surcharge not to exceed five percent (5%) of the production cost, with no additional profit margin, markup, or marketing cost applied.

2. "Below-retail pricing" means a price calculated as the production cost plus a surcharge not to exceed ten percent (10%) of the production cost, applicable to essential goods.

3. "Center" means an Iowa food assurance center established under section 159.35.

4. "Department" means the Iowa department of agriculture and land stewardship.

5. "Director" means the director of the Iowa food assurance program appointed under section 159.34.

6. "Eligible resident" means any natural person who is a resident of the state of Iowa.

7. "Essential goods" means basic consumer products necessary for daily life, including but not limited to:

a. Clothing and footwear;

b. Household cleaning and maintenance supplies;

c. Personal hygiene products;

d. School and educational supplies;

e. Basic home furnishings;

f. Basic tools and hardware;

g. Infant and child care products;

h. Seasonal necessities including winter clothing and heating supplies.

8. "Facility surcharge" means a charge not to exceed five percent (5%) of the production cost of a food product or ten percent (10%) of the production cost of an essential good, applied to cover the operational costs of a food assurance center, including but not limited to facility maintenance, labor, utilities, and transportation.

9. "Farm share" means the percentage of retail food cost attributable to the actual production of the food product, as determined by the USDA economic research service food dollar series or successor publication.

10. "Marketing share" means the percentage of retail food cost attributable to processing, transportation, wholesale distribution, retail operations, and profit margins, calculated as the difference between retail price and farm share.

11. "Production cost" means the cost of producing a food product or essential good as determined by the department based on wholesale acquisition price from producers, cooperatives, or the most proximate point in the supply chain to the point of original production.

SECTION 4. NEW SECTION. 159.33 Iowa food assurance program, creation, purpose.

1. There is hereby created in the department the Iowa food assurance program.

2. The purpose of the program is to establish state-operated food distribution centers where all Iowa residents may purchase the full range of grocery products at at-cost pricing, modeled on the United States military commissary system as authorized by 10 U.S.C. section 2484 and as operated by the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) continuously since 1867.

3. The program shall:

a. Establish and operate food assurance centers throughout the state of Iowa;

b. Purchase food products directly from Iowa producers, cooperatives, and wholesale suppliers at or near production cost;

c. Sell food products to Iowa residents at at-cost pricing as defined in section 159.32;

d. Prioritize procurement from Iowa farms and ranches to the maximum extent practicable, consistent with Iowa's status as the first or second highest food-producing state in the nation;

e. Accept all forms of payment including but not limited to cash, electronic benefit transfer (EBT), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) vouchers;

f. Operate without profit motive, with all revenue above operational costs reinvested in program expansion;

g. Distribute essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance centers and through dedicated distribution points.

SECTION 5. NEW SECTION. 159.34 Director, appointment, qualifications.

1. The secretary of agriculture shall appoint a director of the Iowa food assurance program.

2. The director shall have demonstrated expertise in:

a. Supply chain management and logistics;

b. Agricultural economics or food systems;

c. Public administration.

3. The director shall serve at the pleasure of the secretary and shall receive compensation as established by the department of administrative services.

SECTION 6. NEW SECTION. 159.35 Pilot food assurance centers, locations, timeline.

1. Within two (2) years of the effective date of this division, the department shall establish not fewer than five (5) pilot food assurance centers in the following regions:

a. Two (2) centers in the Des Moines metropolitan area;

b. One (1) center in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City corridor;

c. One (1) center in the Davenport-Quad Cities area;

d. One (1) center in the Sioux City or Council Bluffs area.

2. Within five (5) years of the effective date of this division, the department shall expand the program to not fewer than twenty (20) food assurance centers statewide, ensuring that no Iowa resident is more than thirty miles from a center in urban areas or more than sixty miles from a center in rural areas, with priority given to Iowa's 99 counties based on food insecurity rates.

3. The department shall prioritize locations with the highest rates of food insecurity, the greatest distances to existing grocery retail, and the largest populations residing in food deserts, with specific attention to rural communities where commercial grocery stores have closed.

4. Each center shall:

a. Operate not fewer than six days per week;

b. Maintain inventory of not fewer than 5,000 distinct grocery products and a selection of essential goods;

c. Accept all forms of payment including SNAP, WIC, and other federal nutrition assistance instruments;

d. Post both at-cost prices and equivalent commercial retail prices for each product to demonstrate savings to consumers;

e. Prioritize procurement from Iowa agricultural producers where product quality and availability are comparable;

f. Employ Iowa residents at wages not less than the greater of the state minimum wage or the living wage for the county in which the center is located;

g. Maintain transparent accounting accessible to the public showing acquisition cost, operational overhead, and surcharge for each product category.

SECTION 7. NEW SECTION. 159.36 Iowa food assurance fund, creation.

1. There is hereby created in the state treasury the Iowa food assurance fund.

2. The fund shall consist of:

a. Moneys appropriated by the general assembly;

b. Revenue from facility surcharges collected by food assurance centers;

c. Grants, gifts, and donations from any source, public or private;

d. Any federal funds made available for food distribution programs.

3. Moneys in the fund are continuously appropriated to the department for the purposes of this division.

4. The department shall maintain separate accounting for each food assurance center and shall publish annual financial reports demonstrating the production cost, facility surcharge, and total cost to consumers for each product category.

SECTION 8. NEW SECTION. 159.37 Iowa producer priority.

1. The department shall establish procurement protocols that prioritize Iowa-produced food products. Not less than fifty percent (50%) of the total wholesale acquisition value of food products purchased by food assurance centers shall be from Iowa producers in the first three (3) years, increasing to not less than seventy percent (70%) by the fifth year.

2. The department shall establish guaranteed purchase contracts with Iowa farms, ranches, and cooperatives to provide stable revenue for Iowa agricultural producers and to reduce producer dependence on commodity market price volatility.

3. The department shall establish a fair pricing formula for Iowa producers that:

a. Guarantees producers a price not less than the USDA-reported farm share for each commodity category;

b. Eliminates intermediary markups between producer and center;

c. Provides production planning data to producers to reduce waste and enable crop planning.

4. The department shall coordinate with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach and the Center for Industrial Research and Service (CIRAS) to identify supply chain efficiencies and connect Iowa producers with the program.

SECTION 9. NEW SECTION. 159.38 Essential goods procurement and distribution.

1. The department shall coordinate with the Iowa economic development authority under Iowa Code chapter 15 to establish procurement contracts with Iowa manufacturers to produce and distribute essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance centers and through dedicated distribution points.

2. The program shall:

a. Identify essential goods categories suitable for Iowa manufacturing;

b. Establish guaranteed purchase contracts with Iowa manufacturers to produce essential goods at production cost;

c. Distribute essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance centers and through dedicated distribution points;

d. Stimulate Iowa's manufacturing sector through guaranteed demand contracts.

3. The distribution of essential goods shall be tiered according to how frequently a good is needed:

a. Constant-need goods, including food and consumable supplies, shall be distributed on a recurring basis through food assurance centers;

b. Semi-permanent goods, including clothing and household supplies, shall be distributed on a need-based schedule with reasonable limits established by rule to prevent resale or stockpiling;

c. Durable goods, including home furnishings, tools, and appliances, shall be distributed at below-retail pricing on a one-per-household basis through dedicated distribution points;

d. Currency continues to operate for luxury, custom, and specialty goods not covered by the essential goods program.

SECTION 10. NEW SECTION. 159.39 Reporting.

1. On or before January 31 of each year, beginning the second year after the effective date of this division, the director shall submit to the general assembly, the governor, and the legislative services agency an annual report containing:

a. The number and locations of food assurance centers in operation;

b. Total sales volume and number of customers served;

c. Average savings per customer compared to commercial retail pricing;

d. Percentage of procurement from Iowa producers;

e. Operational costs and surcharge revenue;

f. Number and types of essential goods distributed;

g. Average savings per consumer compared to commercial retail pricing for essential goods;

h. Number of Iowa manufacturing jobs created or sustained through program contracts;

i. Progress toward self-sufficiency through surcharge revenue;

j. Impact on SNAP benefit utilization rates in served areas.

GENERAL PROVISIONS

SECTION 11. Program coordination.

1. The governor shall designate a coordinator for the food and commodity assurance program to ensure that the food assurance program established in section 159.33 and the essential goods program established in section 159.38 operate as an integrated whole.

2. The coordinator shall:

a. Ensure that food assurance centers serve as community sites where the economics of at-cost distribution are visible and accessible to the public;

b. Coordinate with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach and the Center for Industrial Research and Service to align program operations with Iowa's agricultural and manufacturing base;

c. Report annually to the general assembly on program operations.

SECTION 12. Appropriation.

1. For the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2027, the following sums are appropriated from the general fund to the departments indicated:

a. To the department of agriculture and land stewardship, for the Iowa food and commodity assurance program established in section 159.33: FORTY MILLION DOLLARS ($40,000,000);

b. To the Iowa economic development authority, for the essential goods procurement and distribution program established in section 159.38: FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS ($15,000,000);

c. TOTAL APPROPRIATION: FIFTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS ($55,000,000).

2. The total appropriation of $55,000,000 represents approximately 0.6 percent of Iowa's $9.425 billion general fund for fiscal year 2026 [SOURCE: Iowa Capital Dispatch, May 23, 2025]. It is the planning-and-pilot appropriation; the full Division I food program target is set out below.

3. FISCAL CONTEXT AND PROJECTED SAVINGS:

a. Iowa currently administers SNAP benefits to approximately 264,500 recipients who purchase food at commercial retailers where 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather than food production. At-cost pricing would deliver approximately four (4) times the food value for each benefit dollar;

b. The food assurance program is designed to achieve self- sufficiency through volume surcharges within seven (7) years;

c. Healthcare cost reductions from improved nutrition are projected to offset a portion of program costs over time. Iowa Medicaid covers approximately 600,000 Iowans, and food-insecurity-related healthcare costs represent a quantifiable savings opportunity;

d. Iowa's agricultural production generates approximately $38.75 billion in annual cash receipts. The food assurance program would redirect a fraction of consumer spending back to Iowa producers at fair prices, strengthening rather than undermining the agricultural economy.

DIVISION I FOOD PROGRAM TARGET. The at-cost food assurance program established in Division I, serving Iowa's population of 3,238,387 residents [SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 estimate, July 1, 2025; Des Moines Register, January 27, 2026], requires approximately $1.001 billion per year at production cost. That figure is the product of $309 per resident per year, the cost of a base list of twenty-five staple food items priced at thirty percent of the lowest retail price per the USDA Food Dollar Series methodology [SOURCE: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series, 2023], applied to the verified population. Against Iowa's general fund of $9.425 billion [SOURCE: Iowa Capital Dispatch, May 23, 2025; Iowa Legislative Services Agency, Fiscal Report 2025], the program target is approximately 10.6 percent. A fuller thirty-seven-item baseline at $609 per resident per year would cost approximately $1.97 billion, or 20.9 percent of the general fund; it is recorded here as an expansion goal, not the enacted target.

THE FISCAL CONVERGENCE. The arithmetic says that ending the gap costs a single-digit percentage of the markup the state already pays. The operational template has run for one hundred fifty-nine years inside the same federal apparatus the state already funds. Iowa is not asked to attempt something untested. Iowa is asked to deliver to its own residents what its veterans, including the households served at Camp Dodge and at the Rock Island Arsenal, have received since 1867.

THE FEDERAL SNAP COST-SHIFT. Federal H.R. 1 (2025) increased the state share of SNAP administrative costs from fifty percent to seventy-five percent, effective October 1, 2026 [SOURCE: Public Law 119-21, 2025]. Iowa currently routes SNAP benefits through commercial retailers where 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather than food. At at-cost routing through Division I, approximately 95 cents of every dollar reaches the recipient as food, the production cost plus a five percent surcharge, a 3.9-fold increase in delivered food value per SNAP dollar that independently offsets the federal cost-shift.

THE FISCAL LOCK. The argument that Iowa cannot afford this act is refuted by the state's existing expenditure on the less efficient version of the same objective while absorbing a federal SNAP cost-shift the state did not request. The fiscal question is not whether to spend. It is whether to continue spending four times the production cost to accomplish the same result. A legislature shown the arithmetic, the operational template, and its own constitutional authority, and declining still, is not neutral. Denial is no longer neutral.

SECTION 13. Severability.

If any provision of this act or the application thereof to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the invalidity shall not affect other provisions or applications of this act which can be given effect without the invalid provision or application, and to this end the provisions of this act are declared to be severable.

SECTION 14. Safety clause.

The general assembly hereby finds, determines, and declares that this act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, and safety.

SECTION 15. Effective date.

This Act takes effect July 1, 2027. Pilot food assurance centers shall be operational within two (2) years of the effective date. Planning and procurement shall begin upon enactment.

SECTION 16. Repeal of conflicting provisions.

All acts and parts of acts inconsistent with this act are hereby repealed.

REFERENCES

The research and citations incorporated in this act include but are not limited to:

FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE: - Penck, Albrecht. Earth carrying-capacity calculation (1925). - Cohen, Joel. "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" (1995). - United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series (farm share 24.3 cents, marketing share 75.7 cents, 2023 data) and Household Food Security in the United States in 2023 (December 2025). - Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA), operational since 1867, codified at 10 U.S.C. Section 2484. - Public Law 119-21 (2025), SNAP administrative cost-shift. - Galbraith, John Kenneth. "The Affluent Society" (1958). - Veblen, Thorstein. "The Engineers and the Price System" (1921). - Fresco, Jacque. "Designing the Future" (2007); The Venus Project. - USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024 State Agriculture Overview for Iowa. - Federal Reserve Board, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization (G.17). - Bureau of Labor Statistics, Q4 2024 manufacturing establishment data. - Feeding America, "Map the Meal Gap," Iowa 2023 data. - USAFacts, Iowa SNAP participation data, FY2025. - Cooper, Imran Stanton. "The Mathematics of Abundance: Two Proofs That Scarcity Is a Policy Choice" (2025). - Cooper, Imran Stanton. "Stolen Futures: The Technical Inheritance We Were Denied" (2025). - Cooper, Imran Stanton. "Historical Apoplexy," Papers I through X (2025-2026), including Paper V, "The Targeting Error," and Paper VII, "The Structural Overload."

PUBLIC HEALTH: - Marmot, Michael. Whitehall Studies I and II (1967-present); "Health inequalities among British civil servants: the Whitehall II study," The Lancet 337 (1991); "The Status Syndrome" (2004); "The Health Gap" (2015). - Sapolsky, Robert. "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" (1994); "Behave" (2017). - Shively, Carol. "Social Stress, Visceral Obesity, and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis," Obesity 17 (2009); "Stress, Depression, and Coronary Artery Disease" (2014). - Blackburn, Elizabeth, and Epel, Elissa. "The Telomere Effect" (2017). Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2009). - Bowles, Samuel, and Gintis, Herbert. "Schooling in Capitalist America" (1976), as corrected by the targeting-error analysis in Cooper, Paper V (2025).

HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT: - Suetonius, "Lives of the Twelve Caesars," Life of Augustus. - CIL XI 1147, Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia (Nerva alimenta). - Yang et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution (September 2024), Mabu Co Tibetan Plateau settlement. - Brinkhuis, H., et al. "Episodic fresh surface waters in the Eocene Arctic Ocean," Nature 441 (2006), the Azolla Event. - Smith, Adam. "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part III.

IOWA-SPECIFIC DATA: - Iowa Code, Chapters 15, 159, and 234. - Iowa Administrative Code, Chapter 441-65 (SNAP administration). - Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. - Iowa Economic Development Authority. - Iowa Department of Health and Human Services; Iowa Medicaid coverage (approximately 600,000 Iowans). - Iowa Workforce Development, Iowa Manufacturing Industry Profile (approximately 220,000 manufacturing workers, 59,546 in food manufacturing, across all 99 counties). - Center for Industrial Research and Service (CIRAS); Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. - Iowa Legislative Services Agency, Fiscal Report 2025 (FY2026 general fund $9.425 billion). - Iowa Capital Dispatch (May 23, 2025), FY2026 budget figure. - Governor Reynolds, FY2027 Budget Proposal (January 2026); NASBO. - U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 population estimates; Des Moines Register (January 27, 2026), Iowa population 3,238,387. - Iowa House File 1032 (2025 session, rural grocery store support). - Feed Iowa First, hunger-in-Iowa statistics. - Ballotpedia, "States without initiative or referendum"; Cedar Rapids Gazette (September 30, 2024). - Iowa Legislature, "How a Bill Becomes a Law"; "Bill Drafting Guide and Style Manual."

COLORADO ORIGIN: - Colorado Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act (originally drafted 2015-2016 by Cooper through the Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation; formalized February 2026).

END OF BILL

Iowa Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

Prepared for the Ninety-First General Assembly of the State of Iowa, Second Regular Session.

Originally proposed (Colorado): 2016 (Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation, Cooper) Adapted for Iowa: February 2026 (Historical Apoplexy series, Cooper)

Filed by: _________________ [Sponsor/Legislator] Address: _________________ [Iowa address required] Date: ___________________

"A civilization that possesses abundance and maintains scarcity is not poor. It is sick." Historical Apoplexy (Cooper)

"Iowa feeds the nation. Iowa cannot feed itself. The mathematics of this contradiction is the diagnosis."

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Verification notes & full source chain

Constitutional path: Legislative path only.

Distribution-model precedent: The U.S. Defense Commissary Agency (10 U.S.C. § 2484), operational since 1867, sells groceries at cost plus a five-percent maintenance surcharge with no profit allowed by law. 2.8 million authorized users, 236 stores worldwide, $4 billion annual sales, $1.3 billion federal appropriation paid by all taxpayers including the 330+ million civilians denied access. This bill extends the same at-cost distribution model to all residents of Iowa.

Public-health-equity evidence: The Marmot Whitehall Studies (1967-present), Sapolsky's Serengeti baboons, Shively's cynomolgus macaques, and Blackburn's Nobel-winning telomere research establish that hierarchy itself kills across four research programmes, six decades, and three species. The gap is the gradient. Food assurance reaches beyond bare survival because the gradient damages population health even where calorie minimums are met.

Abundance arithmetic: 293,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities at 77 percent utilization; 19.5-29.3× the productive overcapacity required to provide universal abundance in consumer goods. 47.9 million Americans food-insecure; $32 billion ends domestic hunger; $496 billion is the annual U.S. food-industry markup over production cost; the gap is operational evidence of manufactured scarcity, not evidence of resource constraint. See Paper III, The Mathematics of Abundance.