One thing that I haven’t been able to work out is that Trump has pretty solid support from rural areas. That means that farmers are a political factor.

But I’ve seen probably three different policies at least that look like they’ve got a lot of potential to be disadvantageous to agribusiness:

• Trade wars. Okay, it might just be to benefit manufacturing workers, that that’s more critical, but typically starting spats results in restrictions being based on US agricultural exports in response, which is bad for American farmers.

• This credit pause on federal loans. It looks like that’s been blocked already. Maybe it was political theater, done with the expectation of being blocked – I don’t have the familiarity to say how certain that was. But I suspect that farm loans would likely have been affected, as they aren’t individual aid.

• Free school lunches and food stamps are basically a political deal struck to provide subsidies to agribusiness. My understanding from past reading is that subsidies to crop insurance used to be a more-important route, but that farmers lost enough political clout that they couldn’t get the subsidies alone.

• Illegal immigration provides a lot of manual labor that’s important for farming.

Now, okay. People don’t always vote for their personal financial advantage. I remember that in the UK, there was a good deal of discussion about farmers supporting Brexit, despite the fact that in general, Brexit was not expected to be a good idea for famers. And it didn’t work out well:

https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/eu-referendum/analysis-7-years-after-brexit-farmers-count-the-cost

Conducted in late May and early June, the survey attracted more than 900 responses, covering all sectors and including those who work on farms, as well as those from elsewhere in the industry.

Asked whether they believed Brexit had had a positive or negative effect on the UK economy, the overriding sentiment was negative, with about three quarters of all respondents feeling that way.

And asked about the state of their own businesses due to Brexit, a similar picture emerged, with 69% saying it had been either “fairly negative” or “very negative”.

The British farm industry association NFU did oppose Brexit, and I’d expect them to take a position based on economic impact. It’s possible that individual farmers hadn’t familiarized themselves with the economic implications.

This says that the Farm Bureau, a US industry association, is favorable towards Trump, though it does highlight some concerns (including the illegal immigrants issue and trade war risks):

https://www.capitalpress.com/nation_world/despite-optimism-about-trump-some-policies-trouble-farm-bureau/article_5c781052-dc41-11ef-83cb-23c4d7a5d43a.html

Beyond the expulsion of criminal immigrants, it’s still not clear what exactly the administration has planned for undocumented workers, Duvall said.

At this point, the Farm Bureau has heard from growers about employees who are afraid to show up for work, but it hasn’t been notified of any actual immigration raids on farms, he said.

The organization expects agriculture to have a seat at the table and advocate for immigration and labor reforms that won’t jeopardize U.S. food security, Duvall said.

Increased tariffs on foreign imports could invite retaliatory measures that harm agriculture,

So I don’t think that it’s just not running the numbers.