From Day 1, the Trump administration has moved quickly to implement many of Project 2025’s policy recommendations and to put project architects in positions of power, but agricultural reform is conspicuously absent. The Republican-backed Senate farm bill is only the latest departure from the core values Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise claimed to espouse. That infamous manifesto laid out a governing vision for a Republican administration and the 119th Congress. And broad swaths of the governing Right have otherwise supported and worked to enact so much of the Project 2025 program. All but one glaring exception: Chapter 10, Agriculture.

What could congressional Republicans find so troubling about a conservative agriculture revamp?