Hallie Shoffner talks ‘farm crisis’ in her bid to unseat Sen. Tom Cotton
by June 4, 2025 10:00 am 4,501 views

A.E. Shoffner decided to move from Orange County, N.C., to Jackson County in Arkansas in the 1860s to start a farm. He primarily grew cotton, and it wasn’t long before a cotton gin, complete with railroad switch that ran to it was built.
A mercantile store, a lumber mill and even a post office were also built. The town of Shoffner was born. For six generations his descendants tilled the soils in Jackson County harvesting row crops.
This year that won’t happen.
Hallie Shoffner, the last farmer in the family, told Talk Business & Politics they made the decision earlier this year to shut down the farm. Many factors went into the decision, she said, including higher input costs, low commodity prices, tariffs, and bad federal policies.
Her family owns about 350 acres but leased about 1,650 acres. The farm has soybean, corn, rice and wheat. Shoffner, 37, said she contemplated several different ways to try to plant a crop this year, but none of them made economic sense.
Now that her farm has been shuttered, she said she will seek to unseat U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., in the 2026 election.
“If I can’t farm, I’m going to fight,” Shoffner said. “We couldn’t keep rotating unprofitable crops. It didn’t make any sense. There wasn’t a path forward. We were losing money. … In farming you are only one big rain away from a big loss. I couldn’t look my parents in the face and promise them they wouldn’t lose their land.”
Her parents started SFR Seed in 1988, a soybean and rice research farm. Among other things, the company specialized in new seed plot trials. It has been shuttered, too, she said.
Shoffner has operated the family farm since 2016. She left the farm when she went to college and took various career paths before she returned. Her father began showing signs of dementia, so she returned to help run the farm and eventually took over complete operations.
The number of farm bankruptcies ballooned at the end of 2024, according to Samantha Ayoub, Market Intel economist. When compared to 2023, the number of Chapter 12 bankruptcies was up 55% across the country, and that number is rising faster in 2025, Ayoub reported.
Two major reasons bankruptcies have surged is President Donald Trump’s continued tariff policies and the lack of a new Farm Bill, Bloomberg reported. It was noted the last time there was a surge in bankruptcies was in 2019 when Trump imposed tariffs on China and the federal government spent $23 billion bailing out farmers, according to the Government Accountability Office.
David Mills, a North Carolina farm bankruptcy attorney, said the number of farmers losing their land is surging and many blame lawmakers in the nation’s Capitol, according to Bloomberg.
“‘What’s going on in Washington?’ is the subject of almost every conversation that I have,” Mills said. “There’s a lot of anxiety.”
There is no finite number of farm bankruptcies in Northeast Arkansas yet, but anecdotally several lenders and one bankruptcy attorney told Talk Business & Politics on the condition of anonymity that they haven’t seen a spike like this ever. The attorney said he might have “one or two a year” in the past, but that estimate has ballooned to more than a dozen.
Shoffner is set to officially launch her senate bid in June. She said she will run as a Democrat and is forming her campaign team. Her aim is to visit every county in the state.
“A lot of Arkansans are true independents,” she said. “I want to be a common sense, bipartisan senator. I think a lot of people want someone to represent them. Most people are not extreme, and the parties seem to be controlled by extremes on both sides. Most people, like me, wake up in the morning and try to figure out how they are going to afford groceries [and] health care and how they are going to take care of their kids. I want to be the kind of senator who cares about the things that impact everyday people, every day.”
The traits that make a good farmer can be applied to a political campaign, she said. Shoffner plans to spend every dollar donated to her campaign as if “the person who donated it, couldn’t afford to do so.”
“We are going to work harder than Tom Cotton,” she said.
If elected, Shoffner said she’ll first focus on agriculture policy. One thing she would like to see expanded in any federal Farm Bill is a provision for expanded grants for specialty crops. She would like the tax code simplified for small business owners. The tax code creates “hurdles and barriers” for small business owners and the middle class, and it must be reformed, she said.
Shoffner has a young son and elderly parents. Childcare and elderly care are economic burdens on families, and to her it’s more than that. Taking care of those groups is a moral issue, and the federal government needs to have better policies and programs to aid those groups, she said.
She thinks all federal lawmakers in the state, including Cotton, should attend farm auctions and see firsthand the pain and stress that’s being caused by the policies in Washington, D.C.
“They should be using the term ‘farm crisis’ because that’s what it is,” she said. “We need to work towards stabilizing our industry. I intend to talk about it. I intend to take action. We are in the midst of an agricultural crisis.”