US trade wars: The farmers who trust Trump, but not without worries

[Nergal]

 

Support for President Donald Trump remains strong in the American farming heartland but, as BBC North America correspondent James Cook found in Broadview, Montana, there are also concerns about the drift away from free trade.

Michelle Erickson-Jones should be celebrating.

On the Great Plains, the harvest is coming to a close and she is cutting the very last of this year's wheat, rattling across a golden field in a combine harvester which bristles with technology.

In the cab more than half a dozen screens are pumping out data as the machine reaps, threshes and winnows. A tablet superimposes the track of the great green-and-yellow beast on a satellite image of the land.

Farming here in Montana is a hi-tech business with a global market. The most important customer for this farm is not a bakery in the nearest village but the world's third largest economy, Japan.

And that is why Ms Erickson-Jones is worried.

"We spent decades building that market," she says.

So what happened? In a word, Trump.