By The Editorial Board, Opinions from the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board
How strange is this year in Texas politics? Consider this: No matter whether it’s the Republican or Democrat who wins, Texas’ next agriculture commissioner will be a friend to pollinators, a foe of dangerous pesticides and a promoter of healthy school lunches.
We’re excited about both candidates, but one will get more done. Our pick in the race is Nate Sheets. He is very much a Republican, and we’re aware that this year, Houston-area voters don’t seem to look kindly on Republicans. But food, he says, “should be nonpartisan” — and we agree.
In Sheets, 56, the MAHA movement converges with the business know-how that hard-pressed Texas farmers sorely need. We’re convinced he’ll bring professionalism and management experience to an office that has suffered from a lack of serious leadership under incumbent Republican Sid Miller.
Sheets wanted to make America healthy again before MAHA was an acronym. When he was a teenager, his mother fought breast cancer; much later in life, she struggled with Alzheimer’s, which had never before been seen in the family. Both diseases, he believes, were likely linked to her exposure to chemicals, including Roundup, a pesticide used not just by farmers but by backyard gardeners.
After a life-changing mission trip to Venezuela, he went to work in marketing and advertising for the evangelical Global Ministries Foundation (later known as C3). After he stepped away from that in 2010, his beekeeping hobby morphed into a serious business, Nature Nate’s Honey — now the biggest branded honey company in the United States. He sold it to a private equity firm two years ago.
We believe that Sheets’ forward-looking, God-and-others-first flavor of evangelical Christianity will provide the moral backbone too often lacking in other Republican candidates. (Here’s looking at you, Ken Paxton.)
“Texans should feed Texans,” he says, and we like his ideas for making free-market capitalism work better for farmers and rural communities. For instance, he wants to turn the ag department’s GO TEXAN program — now not much more than a logo — into a consumer-facing marketplace.
He’d also help Texans to create more food-processing companies, such as meatpackers, creating jobs in rural counties and fostering competition that would put more money in ranchers’ pockets. He notes that keeping that processing here in the United States isn’t just a smart economic move; it would reduce Americans’ chances of contracting foodborne illnesses as well as reduce our food-related national-security risk. The state agriculture department oversees Texas’ school lunch programs, and Sheets says it’s crucial that we make sure our kids get cleaner, more nutritious lunches. “Texas ranks 44th in the nation in education,” he told us. “You can’t be No. 1 in education if you’re No. 44 in lunch.”
Sheets both believes that the United States must control its borders and recognizes that U.S. farms depend on labor from Mexico. He supports requiring farmers and ranchers to use the federal E-Verify system, and would also call for expanding legal immigration pathways that allow people to work temporarily in the United States.
We think he’d make a great ag commissioner — even if we grimace a bit whenever he quotes RFK Jr.
That said, there are solid reasons why many Houston-area voters might prefer Clayton Tucker, the 35-year-old Democrat in the race. A progressive populist activist from a Lampasas ranching family, he’s allied closely with Jim Hightower, the hellraiser who was Texas’ last Democratic agriculture commissioner. On the campaign trail, Tucker wears a white cowboy hat like Hightower’s, and he spouts folksy, Hightower-esque one-liners (“it’s about organized people fighting organized money”). If a nostalgic old Democrat squints at Tucker, it kinda feels like 1983.
Heck, the whole race might as well be a nostalgic throwback: a rural, populist Democrat who campaigns in a cowboy hat against a Republican businessman with great salt-and-pepper hair.
Tucker has made hell-no opposition to data centers central to his campaign. He supports legal sales of hemp THC. He’s opposed to Flock cameras and a border wall through Big Bend. When Tucker talks about ag-related corporations, it’s not about creating new ones. It’s about busting up existing monopolies.
But even if those stances resonate with you, here’s the thing: The ag commissioner doesn’t have real power over that stuff. If Tucker won, he’d have a better platform to talk about those issues. And that’s about it.
We believe that Sheets would be more effective in doing the actual job of ag commissioner — better able to get cooperation from legislators in both parties, better able to update and strengthen Texas agriculture and make the agriculture-related changes that most Texas voters would agree we need. He’d plain get more done.
So please, for the sake of the pollinators and the farmers and the schoolkids’ lunches, vote for Nate Sheets.
