U.S. Senate candidate Kimberly Graham says enforcing agriculture antitrust laws would be the solution to help Iowa’s struggling farmers.

“Farming should never be a nonprofit enterprise, and that is exactly what it has become for far too many farms,” Graham, an Indianola lawyer, said in her appearance on Iowa Fourth Congressional District candidate J.D. Scholten’s virtual town hall this past weekend.” One of the things that would help the most, that isn’t really sexy, is antitrust legislation. It’s not an instant fix, but we need to be enforcing our antitrust laws.”

Graham is vying for the Democratic nomination on June 2, and is in a primary field that includes U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Mike Franken, Kimberly Graham, Eddie Mauro and Cal Woods. The winner will face Republican incumbent Sen. Joni Ernst in November.

Ernst has been Iowa’s junior senator since 2015, and her seat is viewed as a must win for Democrats and a must keep for Republicans, who hold a 52-47 edge in the chamber.

Graham, the latest of a series of Democrats to appear on Scholten’s virtual town halls, said her bid for the Senate was motivated by feelings of discouragement stemming from President Donald Trump’s 2016 election.

Instead of complaining about the way things were going, she said, she decided to run for public office.

She said the Trump administration’s loose enforcement of antitrust laws has forced small-town farmers to compete with billion-dollar corporations.

“This current administration isn’t really enforcing (antitrust laws), but I’m sorry to say that they weren’t really enforced under the prior administration either,” she said.

Farmers in Iowa’s Fourth District and throughout the state have been reduced to being “serfs on their own land,” due to expanding agribusiness mergers and monopolies, she said.

“From the top to the bottom, from the seed to fertilizer, it’s all controlled by a couple of companies that dictate pricing up and down that whole chain,” she said. “That equals farmers not having much land, not having much competition to be able to earn a better living.”

An additional proposal Graham raised was an increased localization of the state’s food production. Graham argued that cutting down on food imports and relying on local production could lead to a revitalized rural Iowa.

“We import so much food that we could be growing here,” said Graham. “If we grow the food here and we ship five down miles down the road, instead of 100,000 miles across the seas, it’s so much better all-round for the environment and our rural towns.”

Graham said the country needs to have a universal child care system that’s affordable and high-quality. Her solution is something she said she’s already working on: the American Child Care Act, which she said is a proposal that would expand child care and provide start-up capital for Iowans who want to start in-home day care services.

“This could be a huge help for rural areas so that they don’t have to wait for child care centers to be built,” she said. “We want to get child care up and running and we want to license those people, train those people to provide quality child care to these communities.”

She also is calling for mandatory paid parental leave.

She said mothers in a wealthy country shouldn’t have to return to work one or two weeks after giving birth, “because their employer offers no paid family leave and they can’t afford to lose their job,” she said. “That is absolutely appalling for a nation that claims it values its children, its families, its elders — we do not put out money where our mouth is.”

Even if Democrats can’t regain control of the Senate, Graham said she hopes she can win passage of her proposed legislation through.

“This isn’t necessarily a partisan issue, and I hope those people who are Republicans don’t want to be seen as not wanting to support children and families,” she said.