Farmers should be growing food that people eat.

That may sound simplistic, but Hallie Shoffner, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, ticked off the reasons it’s the way forward, chief among them being that growing the typical rice, soybeans, cotton and corn crops is a losing proposition. 

Shoffner strolled into an Arkansas Times fundraiser luncheon at the Copper Grill on Thursday to hear guest speaker state Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest) do his bull-in-a-china-shop routine, and spared a few minutes to talk with us about the proposed Farm Bill, which has passed in the House and now heads to the Senate. We noted to her that a story by Alex Thomas in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said congressional staffers had met up this week and come to the conclusion that farmers were having a tough go. Nothing new there, but among the list of staffers there was no one mentioned from Tom Cotton’s office. That was surprising since he, being an incumbent Republican senator from Arkansas, should be in a good position to know how far and wide the farmer pain is in his home state where agriculture accounts for $16-20 billion in economic impact and is the state’s leading industry.

Well, surprising to us, but not to Shoffner. 

“He lives on Fox News,” she said. “His goal is to make people afraid of their own shadows. He’s all hot air and fake outrage. He doesn’t give one flying crap about farmers. He just cares about war.”

So how bad are things for farmers in the state? Pretty.

Arkansas led the country in farm bankruptcies last year with 33, which was close to 10% of the nationwide total of 315. That national figure is up almost 50% over the 2024 number.

Farmers in the state have been under water for seven of the past 10 years, according to the state Cooperative Extension Service, with losses averaging $1 billion a year. The shockers are the hundreds of dollars per acre that farmers lose when they grow corn, rice, soybeans and cotton.

And those figures were the estimates before Trump, who tore up the hard-earned Iran Nuclear Deal treaty secured under President Obama, started a war with Iran in the middle of negotiations with them. The side effects of the war have further roiled the agriculture landscape, pushing farmers closer to the edge of financial disaster. And Cotton, as Shoffner noted, has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of the war.

Shoffner said the farm problems go back several years. In 2018, Trump slapped tariffs on China and they immediately stopped buying soybeans, causing $27 billion in losses to farmers. To fix the problem that he caused, Trump instigated a $12 billion bailout for farmers, while Cotton supported his president’s failed strategy.

Fast forward to today. Trump apparently learned nothing from the experience eight years ago, having recently slapped more tariffs on China, which, again, stopped buying soybeans, causing much torment for Arkansas farmers.

But China did learn something.

“They went to Brazil and started developing those markets, and now they give us the middle finger,” Shoffner said. “Now we’re not even the second choice now. Argentina is second. We’re third.” 

Why farmers, who are otherwise seemingly smart people, continued to vote for Trump will remain a mystery.

Continued bailouts over the years set the stage for the farming collapse, Shoffner said. 

“Farmers were making money, but they weren’t,” she said, referring to the federal subsidies that boosted farmers’ bottom lines, but left them dependent on entitlements. “It wasn’t real. But they felt like they were. So they bought new equipment and some took on more land. On our small farm, we were scrappy and didn’t do that, but a lot of farmers did.”

But as the statistics show, the arrows have been pointing down for a while now, with the latest headwinds being enough to bankrupt many farmers in the state.

“Then the bottom fell out,” Shoffner said. “Farmers lost money and then their equity. They rolled their loans over to the next year and then the next year, and the debt grew and grew and grew. It just wasn’t going to work.”

In the end, Shoffner had to throw in the towel, too.

So what about that growing food thing?

Shoffner said the Farm Bill, whatever iteration you pick, isn’t working because it focuses far too heavily on commodity crops like (see above) the ones that farmers are losing money on.

“We need to stop doing that, stop growing just row crops,” she said. “Food crops get almost zero support in the Farm Bill. We’ve got to start growing food.”

One example she gave was sweet potatoes. Farmers in the state grow some 5,000 to 6,000 acres of them, but Shoffner said in many cases, they have to ship them to Canada to be turned into french fries and flash frozen. Then they’re shipped back to Arkansas.

“If we had flash freezer facilities, we could do all of that right here,” she said. “And we have a waiting customer in the public school system.”

A new Farm Bill, she said, should encourage farmers to grow more table fare like vegetables and specialty grains.

“We should be diversifying the agricultural economy,” Shoffner said. “The government should de-risk the process by guaranteeing buyer contracts. This would be a vast improvement over where we are today. But then the bar is pretty low right now; it’s on the floor.”

Hey, Tom, you keeping up with any of this?