Ep. 41 - Farming is Broken: US Senate Candidate Hallie Shoffner Takes the Challenge

A rigged agricultural system is quietly bankrupting multi-generational family farms across the country. With record numbers of farm closures and an economic squeeze caused by global trade wars and consolidated supply chains, understanding the root cause of this market failure is critical for anyone trying to navigate the modern agricultural economy. Hallie Shoffner, a sixth-generation Arkansas farmer and US Senate candidate, brings her firsthand experience of liquidating her family's operation to expose the foundational flaws in modern farm policy. 

We sit down to dissect the reality of the farm bill and why the current federal subsidy model entirely misses the mark. We dive into the dangers of prioritizing high-volume, low-value commodities, the massive impact of consolidated ag-vendors on rising input costs, and the way bridge payments function as direct corporate bailouts instead of actual farmer relief. Hallie shares her blueprint for transitioning rural acres toward specialty crops and localized processing, arguing that diversifying what we grow is the only viable path to saving the industry and feeding local communities.

The harsh reality of running an agricultural operation today involves carrying the massive emotional and financial burden of trying to keep a legacy afloat in a market inherently designed against you. We discuss the devastating spike in farm auctions, the staggering rates of farmer suicides, and the deep frustration of watching federal aid flow directly into the hands of equipment manufacturers and chemical companies. You will walk away with a clear understanding of why merely treating the symptoms of market volatility will never save the agricultural sector without a fundamental, systemic overhaul.

If you care about agricultural policy, supply chain resilience, and the economic survival of rural communities, you’ll get a lot from this. Please subscribe to the channel and share this episode with anyone interested in the real dynamics of American farming. What is the most critical systemic issue in your industry that leaders are afraid to name?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome back, everybody, to the Radical Mutter Podcast. I am your host, Pat O'Brien, and this week I am honored to have U.S. Senate candidate, Democratic nominee, U.S. Senate Senate candidate from the state of Arkansas, Hallie Schoffner. Hallie, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Thank you. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Well, I think everybody who's gonna listen to this podcast already knows why you're here. But tell us what is what are you doing? You are a the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. That's right. What is that all about? How did this happen?

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Well, it's it is both simple and complicated at the same time. I came into this race about a year ago. And it was after the closure of my family farm in Newport. So I'm a sixth generation Arkansas farmer, soybeans and rice, uh, mostly. And I was the primary operator for about nine years when I took over for my parents. And then last year I decided to close because it did not matter what we did or what crops we planted. It wasn't enough financially. And I called my mom and I said, you know, I just if we go another year, we might be in a hole so deep you could lose your house. And unfortunately, that's a conversation that hundreds of farmers had to have across Arkansas. We've lost a quarter of our family farms in Arkansas in the last 18 months. And beyond that, I mean, Arkansas is the hungriest state in the country. We're the second sickest, we're the fourth poorest. Coming out of that experience, I felt that there are just too many Arkansans who who know what it's like to work hard and do everything right and still fall behind, not because they failed, but because the system is rigged against them. And Tom Cotton's one of the guys doing the rigging. So I decided if I can't farm, which is what I wanted to do, I'm gonna fight for the people of Arkansas.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

You you've got an interesting way of entering politics. Correct me if I'm wrong, you had never been elected to anything before.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

This is my first time. Gilbringer go home, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Well, I I for sure. And I that decision, let's go back to that decision. You're you're worried about the farm and you're you're you're making these huge life decisions. Where exactly, like, what was the moment when you said running for United States Senate is the best use of my time? Like what what was it a was it a one moment or was it a multi-week thought process?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

You know, it was one moment, actually. So I this would have been um I decided to close the farm on February the 10th. We had a big auction where we sold off, you know, all the equipment that we owned. And that would have been in March. And there was a town hall scheduled in Little Rock. And a guy named Chris Jones, who ran for governor uh in 2022, is now running in the second congressional district, Democratic nominee. He called me and he said, because I had posted about it online, about the farm closing in Hawaii. He called and he said, Could you come? Could you tell your story? And my initial reaction was no. No, thank you. Um, but I thought about it and and I decided to go. I was very nervous. I'd never done anything like that before. It felt very vulnerable. When I was about to get up on stage, none of the elected officials who'd been invited came. Tom Cotton, John Bozeman, French Hill had all been invited, and empty chairs were up in the front. And I got onto the stage, just having been told that the reason that they weren't there is because Tom Cotton was a few blocks away hosting a fundraiser at $7,000 a plate for his re-election campaign. And I, that two days before, we'd sold off every piece of equipment that we owned. That morning, I had helped strangers load my fuel tanks onto trailers and watched people drive away the tractors and the combines. And I was angry. I mean, I felt like, again, there are just so many Argans out there who are up in the middle of the night, their hearts are hammering, they're staring at the ceiling, and they're thinking, the money is running out, and what on earth am I going to do? And instead of caring about those people, Tom Cotton moved to DC. He pulled a ladder up behind him. And the only time he comes home is to host uh fundraisers that raise him hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that was the moment that I knew that I had to step up and run for office.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

And are you, you're the Democratic nominee, you had success. Are you, are you happy that you made that decision?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

It was not on my life's bingo card to be here. But I'm having a lot of fun. Honestly, I mean, I uh when you're farming, you're stuck in one place, obviously. And you spend a lot of time in your truck with plants. And uh now I get to travel all over the state. I get to meet lots of people I wouldn't have met before, um, see new industries that I never would have been familiar with before. I have a great team. And I just really enjoy talking to people and hearing their stories. Unfortunately, right now, boy, we're having a rough time. I mean, we're just not making enough money. Everything costs too much. And people are getting pushed to the back of the line in favor of the success of big corporations and politicians like Tom Cotton.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

Well, and I'm not, I'm gonna try to not like take sides and try to, you know, create a narrative one way or another in terms of like the national economy and that sort of thing. But you are a farmer and you you mentioned in your opening about the the challenges with the farm economy specifically. And I think I have some a little bit of knowledge of that too, but could can you be specific? Can you break it down? I mean, farming is cyclical, you know, there's some up years and down years. Is are we just going through a bad patch, or is this a broader, like if you look back 50 years, is this a really one of the worst times? I put it in some perspective, if you could.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Well, and there's a long version and a short version. We got nothing but time. Well, good. Okay. Well, I'm gonna do a deep dive because my team knows there's nothing more that I want to do than do a deep dive into farming. Um, so farming's been broken for 40 years, and that has to do with the farm bill. I mean, the farm bill has created a system in which farmers are paid to grow these very high-volume, low-value crops that is soybeans, corn, rice, wheat, cotton, grain sorghum. And that is throughout the Midwest, down into the South and the Southeast, a little bit into Texas. Over time, as markets have globalized and consolidated, we've taken on a lot of risk in that we're not selling these products to many people. Now, Arkansas's top crop is soybeans, and 85% of those soybeans were shipped to China. So in 2018, during the first Trump administration, we had the first trade war with China. That was the first time the president put tariffs on China. And China said, Well, we're not going to buy your soybeans anymore. We were the primary market. And we lost about half of the market at that point. Some of that came back. At the time, a Sonny Purdue, who was the Secretary of Agriculture, got up and said that he told the president that farmers were going to struggle because of this. And the president said, Let's just write them a blank check. And the MFP was born. That was a payment, a bridge payment that was given to farmers because we lost money when the market price tanked because we weren't moving any product. Some of the market came back. Uh then COVID hits and we start getting disaster payments. Um, we get PPP. Um, we get more bridge payments. And over time, farm incomes become inflated, but the income isn't real. It's it's payments from the federal government. Then the farm bill comes up for renewal in 23 and the subsidies are very, very low. And so none of the subsidies are kicking in. And no farm bill came. And then all of a sudden, the money dried up. There were no more federal payments coming, there were no more subsidies, and all of a sudden we realized that we were living in a house built on sand. So then the second Trump administration comes around and more tariffs on China, and China, I guess maybe unbeknownst to other people, farmers knew it was coming. China has a belt and road initiative where they use debt diplomacy to build infrastructure in other countries. They went to Brazil, they built all the infrastructure they needed for soybeans. So when the second trade war came about, they just gave us the middle finger. And they're not buying any of our product. They don't have to. In fact, we were the primary market, we are now the tertiary market because when Brazil sells all their beans, then Argentina kicks in. And then we get our soybeans purchased. So now we're in a situation where there are millions of bushels of soybeans around the state, unsold, with nowhere to go, and millions more acres of soybeans in the ground with nowhere to go at harvest. And farmers have just told me over and over again, we planted what would lose us the least amount of money, and we're praying for a miracle. And I hate to say it, I don't think a miracle's coming. Um, which is why there's not a single crop in Arkansas that's making any money right now, which is why we lead the nation in farm bankruptcies, which is why we've lost a quarter of our farms. And there are more closures coming. I mean, if you talk to the auctioneers in the state, they've never seen so many farm auctions. And I can't tell you what it, I can't fully describe what it feels like to be a multi-generational farmer who is the one that had to close the operation. It's a burden that we all carry. And because of that burden that we all carry, and because of the anxiety that comes with not making any money, knowing the money is running out, feeling that kind of panic, Arkansas also leads the nation in farmer suicides.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Really?

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Yeah. Um the St. Louis uh Fed, Federal Reserve, um set someone down to speak to the Little Rock Rotary Club this past week. And she said Arkansas leads the nation in farmer suicides. That is where we are as an industry.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

You don't want to lead you. That's not what you want to lead the nation in. That you had started, I think, some of that with it, it's a 40-year problem. And so let's start, let's start with the blame first. You know, there have been multiple uh Democrats in the White House. I mean, Bill Clinton was in the White House during some of that period, but multiple uh Senate, you know, people from different parties is my point. Yeah. What where do you think, do you think that before 40 years ago that the the farm policy was greater? Like, like how do we, how did we get here? How do we fix it?

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Yeah, honestly, I feel like what led us into the farm crisis of of the 1980s, so that was the first farm crisis. Actually, I guess it's the second, the Great Depression, then the 1980s. My dad went out in the 1980s, as did a quarter of our farms. Um, and and he actually ended up moving to Texas to become a farm manager, which is what a lot of farmers end up doing. When they go out of business themselves, the only trade they have is farming. So they become farm managers for somebody else. The 1980s was essentially caused by the exact same mistakes that we have made up until now. And that is um, Nixon's agriculture secretary said it first uh get bigger, get out, farm fence row to fence row, high volume, low value. And and over time, again, it became heavily globalized, consolidated amongst just a few buyers. At the same time, we have research that prioritizes yield, just more and more and more yield, again, of a high volume, low value product, because there's not really any added value to these commodities for the most part. And then input costs have gone up. And that's been caused by mass consolidation of ag input companies, ag vendors. So you've got, you know, Bayer and Singenta and Corteva and BASF, and that's it. When I started farming back in um 2016 when I took over the farm, there were eight companies. And the federal government let those companies consolidate. It actually happened under Obama. And we didn't enforce our antitrust laws.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Do you think kind of what I'm hearing is there was somewhat of a race to the bottom with the commodity. Is that is that accurate?

SPEAKER_00 12:45

Yeah, exactly. That's not to say that every part of it is broken. There will always be a place for commodities in America. We've got to do something different. And right now, what they're doing in the Senate, this new farm bill, the Farm Bill 2.0, I'm making air quotes here. Um, this bridge payment that the president has uh suggested, another $11.1 billion, it's not enough. It's A, it's too little, too late. Uh, B, it doesn't actually solve the problem.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Well, and under the capitalist principles, the uh it you probably would agree, when you're just giving someone money, you're not addressing the underlying problem. The market is not being fixed. It's it's just a it's you're kicking the can down the road. And I what I heard in your voice, but I want it to be in your own words. I was kind of hearing we didn't want money, we wanted a solution to the problem. You were giving us money, and we have to take it because we're running a big business, but we didn't really want your money. We wanted a better system, a better market. It I don't want to put words in your mouth.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

No, yeah. No, absolutely right. And and part of the issue we have now is really what's happening is these bridge payments that are coming to farmers for aid, it sounds really good. Oh, you're helping farmers. The issue is it hits our bank accounts for 24 hours and then it's off and it's going to the bank or John Deere or Nutrion or Simplot. It's not a farmer bailout, it's a corporate bailout. It's just flowing right through.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

So that's interesting. And I want to I want to give you an opportunity, because you you've mentioned Tom Cotton here, of course, your opponent, the Republican incumbent for the state of Arkansas. I think he was elected in 2014. How much of this is his fault versus, you know, describe that. I'm sure you think some of this is his fault, but where does where does the fault lie and why is Tom Cotton such a big part of it?

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Well, I mean, the fault lies with everybody. And a part of that I think is lacking absolutely any vision for what agriculture could be. I think a lot of the problem is the fact that we don't have any farmers in the Senate right now. We don't have any farmers in the Senate. Zero. Wouldn't it be great if we had a farmer from the middle of the country fighting for farmers in the U.S. Senate? Tom Cotton is partially to blame because he voted against the farm bill twice.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Did he give reasons? Like, were there specific things that he was?

SPEAKER_00 15:28

He did. He called it a food stamp bill. Now, here's the thing about that. First of all, we're the hungriest state in the country. Surely he knows that. Actually, he may not know that. He may not care enough to know that. We're the hungriest state in the country. Literally, we're the most food insecure state in the country. I'm on the board of the Arkansas Food Bank. We talk a lot about the relationship between the fact that we're hungry and then agriculture's our largest industry. He voted against food relief for the hungriest state in the country. And in doing so, he stabbed farmers in the back. So largest industry, hungriest. I mean, that's that's like a stab in two backs. I think the other issue is that, and and this is not true for John Boseman, because I do think that John Boseman is trying to fight for farmers. I mean, he's the head of the ag committee uh in the Senate. Um, Dumcotton doesn't care enough to understand the relationship between food stamps and agriculture. And to be fair, when we talk about the farm bill, I said that these subsidies we're getting are basically a corporate bailout. I think SNAP benefits are also a corporate bailout. How so? Because the food industrial complex has also consolidated in the same way that the ag vendors have. We have the original, the original reason, like the way that they set the farm bill up in the 1970s, was SNAP was not just a way to feed hungry people, which is important, it was also a way for those people to buy agricultural products from our farmers. That's back when we grew actual food. We don't grow food anymore. So the food industrial complex has created a consolidated supply chain that serves more processed food than it does anything else. I mean, we grow a lot of corn. High fructose corn syrup is in a lot of the stuff that we eat. So all these SNAP dollars, they're flowing through the bank accounts of American citizens into the hands of the food industrial complex, which I would argue is highly processing our foods and making us sick. So SNAP benefits, corporate bailout, farm subsidies, corporate bailout. I actually have a solution. And it's one that Tom Cotton would never in a million years have come up with. And it is we diversify and actually grow food. If you look at a map of the United States and it's color-coded by the crops that we grow, uh, California is a multicolored patchwork of specialty crops, fruits, vegetables, specialty grains. So is Florida. We are dark green for soybeans. You got a little bit of pink in there, a little bit of blue. That's rice and cotton, but for the most part, we're a soybean-producing state. And we're not even the best at it because we don't get the kind of yields that the Midwest gets. So we're producing less volume than the Midwest, which means they're making more money than we are. We also don't process any of the soybeans in Arkansas. We have one crushing facility. For the most part, the farmer gets the money, it gets put on a barge and shipped overseas for processing or to the Midwest. None of that processing power, none of those jobs stay in the state. We have enough dirt, water, and farmers. We could grow food that people eat. And we could sell that food back into the community, which we already know is hungry. And when we do that, it's actually cheaper because it takes 1,500 miles for a vegetable to get to a plate in Arkansas. That's a lot of fuel. That's a lot of money that's going to the middleman. On top of that, now we're talking about food as medicine because it's fresh, healthy, it's affordable. We're supplying food outside the food industrial complex and their consolidated supply chain. The other benefit is it takes a lot of businesses to support the specialty crop industry because you can't just stick it into a dried grain bin and leave it alone. You have to actually sort and wash and process. That's on farm, that's near farm, that's new businesses. And those are going to be built in rural communities that are dying right now. I'm not saying it would be easy. None of it would be easy. We'd have to have a new farm bill that incentivized agriculture in a different way. We'd have to have some public-private investment in building up this kind of infrastructure, you know, leveraging the government size to de-risk market building. And then you'd have a U.S. senator who is willing to knock down the door of any country or company that wants to buy an Arkansas-grown, Arkansas-made product.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

So you'd have an advocate, and you kind of at the end there got to something I want to touch on. You led with Tom Cotton, wouldn't go for this. So let's assume you're right and that he's just not interested in your idea. Let's say hypothetically, you don't win this November and you don't become the next U.S. senator. Would you how many farmers do you think you could rally in Arkansas and maybe beyond to work this idea, even if it's not starting as a U.S. senator?

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Oh, well, I don't entertain that question.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Fair.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Because I am going to win. Okay. I am going to win. But I will tell you, farmers are ready. They're already ready. I mean, keep in mind, I've been, you know, I farmed for nine years as the primary operator. I grew up in farming. So I'm I'm very familiar with the farmers in my area and in other places. Also, you know, during the nine years that I farmed, I also did a lot of advocacy for conservation and sustainable farming. Um, and this diversification idea, I've been working on this since 2019. There's like a full three-phase plan that we did through an advisory panel called the Delta Ag Alliance. You can look it up on on, you can look up every single phase on the internet. I'm fairly well known in the farming community, and I talk to a lot of farmers, and they will grow anything that makes them money. As long as they can transition without taking on too much risk, they'll grow it.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

I mean they're capitalists. Yeah. They they they want to make money, and why would they not?

SPEAKER_00 21:23

And there's some low-hanging fruit crops, no pun intended. Uh, specialty rice. We grow a lot of rice in Arkansas. And, but we grow just an average long grain that doesn't have a lot of added value. There are lots of specialty varieties out there: basmati, Thai Jasmine. We can grow those in the United States. We can grow those in the Delta. There's dried beans, chickpeas, uh, black eyed peas. Those can all be harvested with the exact same equipment we have already. Now we'd have to step, you know, we'd have to build some new infrastructure for sweet potatoes or more peanuts. We do a lot of peanuts over in the Jonesboro area. Um, you know, if we wanted to do melt. Watermelons, for example. But even in that, like think about sweet potatoes. So a couple of years ago, I had this idea with a farmer friend of mine that grows sweet potatoes. And we said, you know, you can't hand a school in the Delta a raw sweet potato and expect them to be able to do something with it easily. What you could do though is hand them a 15-pound bag of frozen sweet potato french fries. What you'd need is a flash freezing facility. So we built a whole business plan around what would that look like? How much would it cost? How many people would it employ? Where would it be? It would employ like 17 people in Augusta, Arkansas, a town that is going, uh, they're running out of money because they had a tornado blow through about three years ago. There's really no downside to doing this work. I mean, and jobs, increased tax base, increased population, affordable food. You can sell it into the largest restaurant in the United States, which is public school cafeterias. This would work. And it really wouldn't take that much money. We estimate a billion dollars over three years would convert about 3% of our acres. That's a lot of money. That's a billion extra dollars a year in just farm gate money. They're spending a billion dollars a day in Iran. Argentina got a $20 billion bailout right before they undercut our sorbean market. I mean, I feel like the money is there. And I'm not even talking about the government spending that much money. I'm talking about the government leveraging its size to de-risk the market, public-private partnerships.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

I I love the idea. And uh, you know, so since you're gonna win and we're we're not entertaining anything else, you were somewhat, I thought, maybe complimentary of uh Senator Bozeman. Do you think he would go for this idea? I mean, he is in a powerful position right now.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Oh, absolutely. And I know the specialty crop farmers he's already met with. I mean, they go up um to DC every single year to talk about risk management issues within the specialty crop industry. There are very few subsidies in specialty crops. There are none, basically. Um, there's no support in the farm bill for specialty crops. And and when you think about the the recent bridge payment that farmers got, which was approved December of last year, I think it was, I think it was $11 billion, 10 to row crops, one to specialty crops, which is ridiculous because if you have a disaster in a specialty crop industry, you're losing way more money per acre. I mean, watermelons alone makes you like $20,000 an acre. I mean, it costs more to produce it, obviously, but it's got a much higher profit margin.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Well, we we've got several minutes left, but I I think maybe just enough time to kind of close the door on the farm policy. And then maybe in our next episode, I want to talk about other things, the campaign and where you stand on some other issues. But I'm fascinated and I about your farm, the approach to farm uh policy. And I, you know, had read up and and some of the stuff you had talked about, I had heard before, and then uh some of it I hadn't really considered. And I think the part that I like the most is you're you're taking at least a 40-year horizon and saying we didn't get here overnight. It's not just one person's fault. But it would you say that you just don't think anybody is acknowledging the problem? Is that the issue? Is it is it lobbyists who are kind of giving different priorities? Like there is someone is holding this back. Is it ignorance or is it something else that's holding back what you think is the right farm policy?

SPEAKER_00 25:37

You know, honestly, at this point, I think so. In the 1980s, we called it a farm crisis. They literally used those words, farm crisis. None of our elected officials are using that term. And I think it's because they don't want to own it. You know, so they're calling it market volatility or economic downturn in agriculture. You cannot solve the problem if you do not name it. And they don't want to name it because they don't want to own it. Not that, you know, who, not that our elected officials currently are completely at fault, but you are at fault if you don't name it and if you don't solve it. Putting a band-aid on a shotgun wound isn't gonna save anybody's life. And that's what they're trying to do right now.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Well, I I'm not calling balls or strikes on whether or not you're right or wrong, but I would. Do you think that anyone who would contest that statement right there? That this statement that we're not naming it, would somebody say, oh, she's just she's overblowing this problem. It's not nearly the scale, or or do you think they'd have to kind of agree with you if they were put into a debate situation and forced to examine the same facts that you're examining?

SPEAKER_00 26:51

One in six jobs in Arkansas is related to agriculture. You ask any one of those people, and they will agree with me.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Do you are you finding I'm gonna ask it this way, and then we're gonna use it as a segue into the next episode. My understanding is not just in Arkansas, but pretty much across the country. Most farmers voted for Trump three times. Do you think are you seeing conflicts with them now? Or do you think they're like, well, it's just we have a problem, but President Trump has nothing to do with the problem. What what I'm gonna give you kind of a minute or two to kind of take that thought.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

I think what I'm hearing when I'm talking to farmers, really when I'm talking to anybody actually, is this deep sense that Washington is broken and that everybody up there is culpable. And I don't disagree, honestly. I mean where where are we as a state right now? We're hungry and we're sick and we're poor. Rural communities like where I'm from are dying. And that didn't happen overnight. That happened because of just benign neglect or just the prioritization of corporate capitalism over the well-being of the people of Arkansas. And people are starting to realize that because they're turning out their pockets and there's nothing in them, or we're shoving all our money in our gas tanks. And so there's this deep sense of frustration. And I say that because I talk to a lot of folks who have voted Republican the last three times. And we sit down, we we agree on 90% of what we talk about, especially when it comes to economic issues. And we all say, well, if if we can have this conversation and we can agree, why can't they?

SPEAKER_01 28:46

I I like the argument. Uh we're gonna run out of time for this week's episode. I'm gonna kind of summarize my take on what you've said specifically about farm policy. I think you've got some provocative ideas, some innovative ideas, quite frankly, things I've lived in Arkansas pretty much my whole life, things that I'm only hearing probably because of your campaign. And just at a minimum, the win is you're talking about things that I don't think were named or were even considered that big of a problem. And I think that's a win uh right off the bat, but I know you're gonna, you say you're gonna win otherwise. So we're gonna have you back on next week to talk about that and more of the nuts and bolts of the campaign. Folks, uh, I want to thank Halle Schaffner for being on this week's episode. And uh that's the conclusion, and I want to say that's the POV of P.O.B.