I think you need to start by looking at the differences in culture and lifestyle before you get to specific policies.
Here’s a big one: People in rural areas generally live in high-trust communities with lots of social engagement, lots of mutual aid, etc. I lived on a farm in my childhood, and our ‘insurance’ was our neighbors. If someone got sick during harvest, everyone else would pitch in and bring in the neighbor’s crop. If a barn burned down, people pitched in to help build a new one. The church was often the center of rural life - not just for sermons, but for the socialization afterwards that tied the community together and the bulletin boards that announced jobs, or goods for sale, or marriages, or whatever. People generally felt like they had a shared stake in the community, and therefore actually needed very little government help.
People who live in cities generally live in a cosmopolitan world where their neighbors are strangers, there are no large extended families to look after children while you work, if you get sick you’re on your own, etc. So people in cities tend to look to the government to help them and protect them.
The thing is, the same policies that help people in the city can destroy rural communities by supplanting the social safety net administered by friends and neighbors with ones administered by bureaucrats. Environmental laws that make sense in congested areas can be seen as nothing but a burden to people who have lived in a rural area their whole lives and think they know a lot more about its environment than some Senator in Washington.
Take the Green New Deal. It would destroy agriculture. Farmers use a LOT of fossil fuels, and they have expensive infrastructures dedicated to fossil fuel delivery, storage, and use. Tell them they will have to give up their tractors and combines and pickup trucks and generators and augers and all the rest of their gas powered equipment in ten years, and you’ll make an instant opponent, because they know that it’s dangerous nonsense. Some of that equipment is so expensive that smaller farms may have equipment that is generations old, and there’s no way in hell they could afford new replacements.
Imagine if you were told not that you’re going to have to pay a little more money for your apartment heating for a carbon tax, but that you were going to have to replace most of the major property you own for new stuff that is ten times as expensive, and that you have no way to afford. That’s what farmers are facing.
Then there’s the problem of crazy federal regulations running up against the complexity of reality and rural people paying the price. If you have to seek a federal waiver to fill in a slough in your field before you can re-seed, or you get sued by the federal government for digging a basement on land your family has owned for 100 years, you get pretty angry.
But mostly, rural folks see their lifestyles fading away, their communities breaking apart, and they blame overzealous government for a lot of it. And some of it is cultural - city people are fundamentally different and have different goals and values, and when they seek to apply them to rural people, you get conflict.
Here’s an example from my home province: The government decided that farmers had been ‘getting away with’ hiring non-union labor, and even child labor, because their kids worked the farm as well, and because there is a lot of unregulated work sharing on farms (neighbors helping neighbors, or a neighbor hiring another neighbor’s teenaged kid, etc) So they announced that farms would be considered job sites, and worker safety rules and other employment rules would have to be applied. Children would have to follow government rules for underage labor, etc.
On paper, this sounds good. Farms should not be dangerous places, and little children should not be worked to death on a farm. But from a farmer’s point of view, having children work the farm is part of the culture. They think it leads to better children, it teaches them how to farm so they can take over one day, etc. It’s part of farming culture. I did it - I was collecting eggs and feeding the cows and pigs when I was 8 years old. I was driving the truck on the pasture by 12, and driving a tractor at 16. I think all of those experiences made me a better person, and if I were still a farmer I would resent the hell out of some stranger telling me my way of life was wrong.
Also, farmers tend to know what they are doing about a wide range of things, because you need to be a generalist. Take a barn raising - a liberal from the city might say that the barn has to meet various codes, and that licensed journeyman must sign off on the structure, electrical, plumbing, etc. But on a farm, if you don’t know how to do these things, you know the people in the community who can. And if your barn burns down or collapses, the only people affected would generally be you and your family, and not the general public. Scammers and frauds can’t last in a tight community, as word gets around. Incompetents soon find they are no longer asked to do jobs.
For a stranger in a city hiring strangers out of a phone book, and who will be building in the proximity of others, those regulations are necessary. On a farm, not so much. In fact, they can completely destroy the community model of engagement.
The new laws also had other unintended consequences which cut right into the heart of what I’m talking about - it threatened to replace the informal, cooperative, high-trust community of farmers with rigid regulations handed down from a government in a distant city. Need a barn raised? Too bad - health and safety training require for all workers, job site needs to be monitored, Workers have to be paid prevailing wages, etc. All rules that make sense in a city full of strangers but just get in the way of a community where everyone knows and trusts each other and are just trying to get things done.
The real answer to this is to have more local government, less federal government. Government that is closest to the problems at hand works best. Government made up of the same kinds of people who will be affected by the laws the government creates will make better choices, as will governments who have the most local knowledge about the specific conditions in the area being regulated.
There are liberal farmers, and conservative farmers. But even liberal farmers have different goals and values than liberal city dwellers. Ignore that at your peril.