Hallie Shoffner running for US Senate to challenge Cotton

Former Jackson County farmer and entrepreneur Hallie Shoffner will seek to be the Democratic Party nominee in the 2026 U.S. Senate race in an effort to unseat two-time incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton.

She told Talk Business & Politics she will officially launch her campaign in June. Shoffner and her family were forced to shutter their family farm located in the small township of Shoffner in rural Jackson County.

A myriad of factors including low commodity prices, high input costs, tariffs, policies at the federal level and other factors compelled the family to shut down the farm earlier this spring, she said. Shoffner said she couldn’t promise her parents, John and Wendy Shoffner who still own the land, that the current economic conditions wouldn’t bankrupt them if they continued operations.

She is the sixth generation of her family to farm in the area.

“If I can’t farm, I’m going to fight,” she said. “We made the decision to shut down the farm in April. I felt like it was a mix of low (commodity) prices and just bad policies in Washington, D.C. I want to change all of that.”

Shoffner is in the process of putting together her campaign staff and developing a strategy to secure the party nomination and defeat Cotton, who was first elected to that Senate seat in 2014.

“We’ve built a great team,” she said.

The U.S. Congress has not passed a new Farm Bill since 2018, and even that bill uses commodity price points from 2012. Commodity prices have collapsed during the past year, and input costs have surged for many farmers.

Many stakeholders within the industry expected throughout the spring that the federal government would take action to save a teetering farm economy, but no new Farm Bill is on the horizon.

Her parents started SFR Seed in 1988, a soybean and rice research farm. Among other things, the company specializes in new seed plot trials. Shoffner decided to return to the family business in 2016 after college, and it includes a 1,500-acre farm.

There was a time when the Democratic Party had a stranglehold on Northeast Arkansas, and Craighead County was the power base in the region. Shoffner said she plans a broad campaign throughout the state, and some of it will be concentrated on the counties in Northeast Arkansas.

“I’m hoping to spend a lot of time in Craighead County,” she said.

Shoffner, as the CEO of Delta Harvest, was a 2024 Talk Business & Politics C-Suite honoree.