UPDATED: Cody Simpson wins runoff election for South Carolina commissioner of agriculture

Clarendon County native and Columbia resident Cody Simpson easily won the Republican nomination to become South Carolina’s next agriculture commissioner in the Tuesday, June 23, runoff election over Danny Ford II.

Simpson secured 62.58% of the vote, or 192,829 votes, to Ford’s 37.42%, or 115,297 votes, and thanked voters for coming out in force in remarks to The Sumter Item on Wednesday.

“South Carolina showed up in force yesterday,” he said. “We won overwhelmingly, and that is a testament to the people of South Carolina who care deeply about their rural communities, and that is exactly why we are running – we are running for the next generation.”

In the tri-county area, Simpson won at the polls by a wide margin. In Sumter County, he captured 71.7% of the total votes to Ford’s 28.3%, while in Lee, Simpson won on 68.8% of ballots. In Clarendon, where he grew up on a family farm in the Home Branch community near Paxville, Simpson won in a landslide with 83.6% of the votes to 16.4% for Ford.

Election results will be certified later this week.

President Trump and Gov. Henry McMaster endorsed Simpson in the GOP primary. He campaigned on reducing regulations and modernizing the S.C. Department of Agriculture.

Simpson said people today are really waking up and realizing where their food comes from, and he thinks they want to get it directly from the farm.

“What I keep hearing from producers and people around is that they want to sell it,” Simpson added, “but it is just that the government – the current regulatory arm of the department – and the permitting is just so burdensome. We have got to cut that red tape and eliminate it.”

Simpson is a fifth-generation farmer and said his family’s farm is about 2,000 acres with land in both Clarendon and Sumter counties.

He graduated from Clarendon Hall in Summerton in 2009 and later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Francis Marion University, based in Florence.

Simpson now lives in Columbia and joined McMaster’s office in 2018 as an agriculture adviser and then served as chief executive assistant. In May 2025, Trump appointed him as the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency’s executive director for South Carolina.

He told The Item that he still pitches in on the family farm on the weekends and at night, especially during harvest season.

Given Simpson’s runoff win, the November general election will feature two Clarendon natives.

Democrat DeShawn Blanding, of Manning, is a former policy analyst for the U.S. House Agriculture Committee. Other candidates on the ballot will be Libertarian Michael Sullens and United Citizens nominee Chris Nelums.

They all will vie to replace Commissioner Hugh Weathers, who is retiring after 22 years leading the state Department of Agriculture.