The farm bill is wide-ranging legislation that sets funding and directs priorities for a variety of federal food consumption and production programs in the U.S. — plus, economic development programs aimed at improving broadband access and providing small business loans, among other things, in rural areas.

Congress usually debates and renews the farm bill every five years. The first farm bill was passed in 1933, with 18 farm bills having been passed in all. The most recent farm bill passed as the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 and it expires at the end September, the end of the federal fiscal year.

Legislators are making the case for the next farm bill to include funding that supports the interests of their constituents, as well as lobbying and advocacy groups. To help guide journalists in coverage of those debates, The Journalist’s Resource is taking a look at academic research on three pillars of farm bills: SNAP, environmental conservation and rural development.

The research featured in this miniseries can inform the questions that journalists at local, regional and national outlets ask of federal lawmakers.

This week, we’re focusing on rural development.

Rural development programs aim to spur business development and improve rural quality of life. These programs directly affect the economic health of rural areas in real ways, such as by providing small businesses with access to loans and funding infrastructure for high-speed internet connections.

There are more than a dozen rural development programs that are part of the farm bill.

“The United States Farm Bill is a sprawling, complex piece of omnibus legislation flying largely under the public radar,” write the authors of a May 2020 paper published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. “It influences eaters, growers, land and water, rural, urban and suburban communities alike, across the country and across the world.”

Rural development programs make up a small fraction of the overall farm bill budget, and funding is largely discretionary. That means the farm bill gives Congress the ability to appropriate a maximum amount for these programs each year. Congress can later change those yearly funding caps.

Recent research finds programs that expand broadband access and provide federally guaranteed loans are associated with increased local wages, reduced risk that small businesses will fail, and other findings featured in the research roundup below.

Under the federal loan guarantee program, the federal government insures 80% of the amount of a loan made by a bank or credit union. The goal is to encourage and enable capital needed for rural entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses.

The way the federal government defines “rural” varies by program, but population counts are “the primary factor used in rural definitions to determine eligible rural areas,” according to an April 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service.

For firms to qualify for the business loan programs, they need to do business in a town or other area with fewer than 50,000 people. USDA grants and loans for utility companies to build out broadband service are for areas with fewer than 20,000 people.

About 14.5 million people lack broadband, and about 11 million of them live in rural areas, according to the Federal Communications Commission’s most recent estimate, published in January 2021.

The FCC defines broadband as download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second. Critics have contended that rural connections may inconsistently reach that speed but still count as broadband, indicating that the number without reliable broadband could be higher. The FCC has used the 25 mpbs benchmark since 2015. In an April 2023 report, the Government Accountability Office found that from 2014 to 2021, there have been “inconsistencies in the scope of FCC’s analysis of the benchmark speed and in the explanation of FCC’s rationale for updating or not updating the benchmark.”

A strong internet connection is a necessity for carrying out day-to-day business for most firms, but it’s particularly important during times of crisis. A September 2023 paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics links every 1 percentage point increase in broadband access in rural counties with $20 more in per capita payments from the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, which provided financial assistance to agricultural producers during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In addition to the unprecedented size of the disaster relief program, CFAP was also unique in that it was the first farm support program that allowed producers to enroll through an online portal rather than in person through a local Farm Service Agency,” the authors write.

Keep reading for more insights on what academic research says about rural development programs aimed at expanding broadband access and guaranteeing loans to businesses.

Research roundup

The Impact of USDA’s Business and Industry Loan Guarantee Program on Tax Revenue in Oklahoma Communities
Ty Rope Smith and Brian Whitacre. Community Development, January 2021.

The study: The authors explore the relationship between farm bill programs aimed at rural economic improvement and sales tax revenue, an “often-overlooked component of effective rural development,” they write. The authors analyze retail sales tax data in 57 municipalities in Oklahoma with fewer than 50,000 people that charged sales tax from 2005 to 2015 — along with data on businesses in those municipalities that received loans insured by the federal Business and Industry Loan Guarantee program.

The findings: Guaranteed rural business loans are associated with a positive and statistically significant effect on retail sales — but this effect only held for when the national economy was doing well, from 2005 to 2010. The authors did not find an association between these loans and improved retail sales from 2010 to 2015, years overlapping much of the slow economic recovery from the Great Recession.

The authors write: “The results also offer strong guidance that policymakers should stay the course over a long time horizon since such downturns cannot be predicted in advance. These findings have implications for future policy evaluation efforts: differing underlying economic conditions can impact evaluation results, and should be considered as an important component of the broader evaluation.”

Stimulating Innovation: Statutory Influence on Electric Cooperative Telecommunications Innovation
Jamie Greig. Journal of Information Policy, May 2020.

The study: The author explores bureaucratic barriers preventing electric service cooperatives, which largely serve rural areas, from also offering broadband internet.

Electricity cooperatives are owned by customers, and profits are reinvested into the cooperative — for example, to maintain or expand infrastructure. There are more than 900 such cooperatives in 47 states. Many exist to distribute electricity from power grids to homes, businesses and agricultural producers in small towns and rural counties.

Nearly six dozen of those electricity cooperatives also provide broadband access, most of them since 2010, after federal legislation put $7.2 billion toward expanding rural broadband. The 2014 farm bill reauthorized rural broadband loan and grant programs, while the 2018 farm bill did the same and allowed Congress to appropriate another $350 million toward expanding rural broadband.

State laws may prevent electricity cooperatives from offering broadband. For example, in Montana and Minnesota, broadband licenses for publicly regulated utilities are only allowed in areas without competing private firms. At the time of the study, 34 states had laws stating electricity cooperatives could form primarily to provide energy services, without explicitly allowing them to provide internet.

The author collected survey responses from officials at a random sample of 210 electricity cooperatives to explore whether state laws and regulations prevent cooperatives from expanding into telecommunications. 

The findings: Nearly 18% of respondents said their electricity cooperatives offer broadband, while a little over one-third said they would in the future. Some 40% were unsure, while 5% said they did not plan to offer broadband.

Almost all respondents — 95% — identified costs to members and general investment costs as the biggest barriers to offering broadband. Nearly two-thirds said laws were a barrier to expanding into broadband, while a little over half identified regulations as an issue. The author identified only eight states that have updated their laws “to reflect the emergence of electric cooperatives as advanced telecommunications providers.”

The author writes: “This analysis shows that in the majority of states, telecommunications service offerings are not being externally stimulated by statute,” meaning most states do not have laws allowing or encouraging electricity cooperatives to offer broadband. “The results show that statutory language is affecting electric cooperatives’ decision to offer broadband service to their members. It also shows that the lack of updated statutory language to reflect a changing industry could reflect the lack of dialogue and action within the legislative environment that these entities operate.”

The Impacts of the USDA Broadband Loan and Grant Programs: Moving Toward Estimating a Rate of Return
Ivan Kandilov and Mitch Renkow. Economic Inquiry, December 2019.

The study: The authors examine the relationship between local wages and three rural broadband development programs that ran at various times from 1997 to 2007:

• A pilot loan program that made $180 million in loans to rural telecommunications providers in 2002 and 2003.
• The Community Connect Broadband Grant program, which has operated since 2002 and targets rural areas without broadband service of at least 25 Mbps.
• The current broadband loan program, enacted as part of the 2002 farm bill.

They restrict their sample to zip codes with fewer than 20,000 people across the 37 states that received at least one broadband loan or grant during the period studied.

The authors filed a freedom of information request to obtain names of counties that received a loan or grant, plus information on the size and timing of the funding. They then analyzed how average wages in the county changed after the broadband loan or grant.

The findings: The first two programs — the pilot and the Community Connect grants — did not affect local payrolls. But, for the current program, the authors associate every $1 increase in loans per capita with a 92-cent increase in yearly payroll per worker.

The authors note that it is difficult to say definitively from their study whether the benefits of the current broadband program outweigh the costs. For example, the data available for their analysis on payrolls don’t encompass people who are self-employed, nor does the data include potential higher home values related to better broadband access. Public services, such as health and education, would also likely be improved with broadband, but those effects are not captured in the analysis. In other words, there are outcomes that are difficult to quantify.

The authors write: “There is a long tradition of the federal government underwriting the costs of universal service provision, dating back to the implementation of Rural Free Delivery of mail in the late 1800s, and continuing on through Rural Electrification Administration subsidization of extending electrical service and telephone service into rural areas … Presumably, such investments reflected an assessment by policymakers that the public goods created by deployment of such integrative infrastructure were sufficiently large to outweigh the relatively steep costs of providing communication services to remote consumers of those services.”

Rural Business Programs and Business Performance: The Impact of the USDA’s Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program
Anil Rupasingha, Daniel Crown and John Pender. Journal of Regional Science, December 2018.

The study: The authors look at establishment and exit data on 1,665 businesses in rural counties across the country from 1990 to 2013 that received federally guaranteed loans. They assess whether participating in the Business and Industry Loan Guarantee program helps reduce the risk that a business will fail. For comparison, these businesses were matched with similar businesses founded in the same year in the same state, but that did not receive guaranteed loans.

The findings: Every $100,000 worth of guaranteed loans is associated with a 5% smaller risk that a business will fold within two years of receiving the loan, the authors find. After six years, every $100,000 is associated with a 2% better chance a firm will still exist. Firms also slightly increased their payrolls, by about 4%, on average, in the two years after receiving a loan. Nearly 9 in 10 businesses in the study that received a guaranteed loan were standalone firms — they were not part of a larger business with multiple locations or divisions.

The authors write: “Since the program loans can be used for investment in building, machinery, and equipment, it is conceivable that the loan investments were directed to new technologies resulting in increased productivity.”

Broadband’s Relationship to Rural Housing Values
Steven Deller and Brian Whitacre. Papers in Regional Science, May 2019.

The study: Does broadband access increase home values? The authors explore this question with data from the Federal Communications Commission and Census Bureau survey data from 2016 on home values and broadband availability across 887 rural counties. They only include counties not directly next to a metropolitan area. Most of the counties studied are in the Great Plains, with overlap in Appalachia, the upper Midwest and northern Mountain West.

The findings: Average yearly income across the counties studied was $44,000, while the average home was worth about $100,000. About two-thirds of households had access to internet speeds of at least 25 Mbps. The authors find that every 10% expansion in geographical coverage of at least 0.2 Mbps is associated with average home values in the area increasing by $661. Effects on home values decline as speeds increase. For every 10% expansion of coverage of speeds of 25 Mbps, average home values increase by $232. Speeds over 100 Mbps have no association with home values.

The authors write: “As connectivity becomes prevalent, the question will likely switch from quantifying the value-added by broadband to focus on the disadvantage of not being connected. Indeed, many businesses and individuals would choose not to locate in an area where a reliable connection is unavailable.”

The Political Economy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Business-Cooperative Service
Josh Matti. Economic Development Quarterly, April 2019.

The study: The author uses data on grants and loans made from 2006 to 2014, across the 40 states where they were disbursed, to explore whether rural development funding through the Rural Business-Cooperative Service reaches those areas and business most in need — and how members of Congress on influential agricultural committees affect which areas get federal money.

The findings: Each state receives about $1.1 million in funding, on average, via the Rural Business-Cooperative Service, the author finds. Each senator on the overall federal budget appropriations committee is associated with an additional $1.1 million, on average, in rural development funding for the state they represent — a 100% increase. Each member of Congress on House or Senate agricultural committees is associated with a 50% funding increase, on average, the author finds.

The author uses the phrase “Congressional dominance,” which originated in a 1983 paper on the Federal Trade Commission, to describe the relationship between rural development and having a member of Congress in a position to influence funding.

The author writes: “The results indicate that factors that are supposed to determine the allocation of funding do not. Congressional dominance is a plausible mechanism helping to explain why federal rural development funds do not always reach the areas of greatest need.”

The post Rural development in the farm bill: A research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The farm bill is wide-ranging legislation that sets funding and directs priorities for a variety of federal food consumption and production programs in the U.S. — plus, voluntary programs aimed at promoting environmental conservation on privately owned land.

Congress usually debates and renews the farm bill every five years. The first farm bill was passed in 1933, with 18 farm bills having been passed in all. The most recent farm bill passed as the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 and it expires at the end September, the end of the federal fiscal year.

Over the coming weeks, legislators will make the case for the next farm bill to include funding that supports the interests of their constituents, as well as lobbying and advocacy groups. To help guide journalists in coverage of those debates, The Journalist’s Resource is taking a look at academic research on three pillars of farm bills: SNAP, environmental conservation and rural development.

The research featured in this miniseries can inform the questions that journalists at local, regional and national outlets ask of federal lawmakers.

This week, we’re focusing on environmental conservation.

Environmental conservation programs are among the largest components of recent farm bills, according to a January 2022 report from the Congressional Research Service.

Conservation efforts made up 7% of the 2018 bill — $60 billion out of an estimated $867 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Research Service. Every five years, Congress may reauthorize, amend or add to existing conservation programs. The Congressional Research Service estimates the yearly cost for these programs will top $6 billion as part of the next reauthorization.

“Objectives of the CRP include reducing soil erosion, enhancing biodiversity, improving air and water quality, decreasing surplus production of agricultural commodities, and providing income support for landowners,” according to an August 2021 paper published in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy.

Federal legislation in 2022 directed an additional $18 billion toward farm bill and other conservation efforts. These funds were part of laws aimed at curbing inflation, slowing climate change and reducing prescription drug prices.

There are three main overarching farm bill conservation programs:

• The Conservation Reserve Program provides financial incentives for private landowners to remove large swaths of land from agricultural production. Since 2021, the program has particularly focused on encouraging the development of grasslands, which serve as habitats for a range of plant and animal life and can help prevent soil erosion.
• The Environmental Quality Incentives Program, where technical experts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture provide free help to farmers interested in incorporating conservation practices into their ranching and crop production.
• The Conservation Stewardship Program, which also provides one-on-one technical assistance, as well as annual payments to encourage agricultural producers to meet conservation goals over five year contracts.

Conservation Reserve Program components

There are three main parts to the CRP program, which is administered by the U.S. Farm Service Agency.

“General CRP” includes entire fields or farms — these lands cannot be used anymore for or food or animal production. They are often lands at risk of environmental degradation, such as from soil erosion.

“Continuous CRP” focuses on conserving parts of land used for production, such as wetland areas, but not entire fields.

“Grasslands CRP” allows animals to graze but prohibits farming or ranching.

As of July 2023, there were 8.4 million acres of whole fields or farms being conserved under the Conservation Reserve Program across the 50 states, along with 7.2 million acres of parts of productive land, and 6.4 million acres of grassland.

“Agricultural landowners with large land holdings, who value hunting, and have positive environmental values, attitudes, and behaviors, were more likely to participate” in at least one of the conservation programs, according to a survey of more than 2,500 landowners, including farmers and ranchers, in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, published in February 2019 in Land Use Policy.

Conservation benefits

Setting aside large parcels of land and allowing ecosystems to replenish can improve air and water quality, as well as increase biodiversity among animal species, research finds.

The authors of an October 2022 paper in Geohealth quantify the economic benefits of improved air quality from land set aside as part of the Conservation Reserve Program.

In examining 2,287 counties from 2001 to 2016, they find an inverse relationship between conservation enrollment and pollution: As the number of acres conserved goes up, fine particulate matter goes down.

They also estimate that across the counties studied, the farm bill’s conservation program avoided 1,353 deaths per year due to declining pollution. The authors estimate the dollar value of those deaths prevented at $9.5 billion.

“These findings provide evidence that CRP may generate economic gains in terms of avoided mortality, well above the cost of the program,” they write.

Likewise, the farm bill conservation program is associated with improved local water quality, according to an April 2021 study published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation.

The authors studied conservation program enrollment and data on water nitrogen levels from 1999 to 2014 across nearly 18 million acres of the Illinois River Basin passing through Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois. They link conservation program enrollment to lower nearby nitrogen levels along the Illinois River and offshoot streams.

“Most improvement can be associated with the CRP practices designed to improve water quality,” the authors write. “Nevertheless, it should be noted that the results indicate correlation but not necessarily causation, thus should be interpreted with caution.”

Numerous bird species, including the grasshopper sparrow, the thick billed longspur and short-eared owls, make grasslands their home. As grassland diminishes, populations of birds that prefer grasslands also decline, find the authors of a January 2022 study of the western Great Plains, published in Ecological Applications.

The authors of another study linking conservation efforts with maintaining biodiversity, published September 2021 in Rangeland Ecology & Management, note that after general conservation contracts expire, grassland contracts, which allow grazing, could be a viable way to preserve animal habitats while allowing land to be productive.

They write that “the vast majority of Great Plains grasslands are privately owned and managed by people who care deeply about conservation of the land but also need to make a living. Managers of private rangelands often acknowledge the importance of wildlife conservation but place this as a far lower priority than livestock production.”

Rental payments

The U.S. Department of Agriculture pays rent on conserved land for the contract term. Payments are made annually.

Rental rates vary by county. Rates are typically lower in states with less fertile land, such as Alaska, where the rate is $41 per acre on average for General CRP lands.

Rates are higher in midwestern states — known as America’s breadbasket, since historically that is where much of the country’s grain has been grown. Producers in Iowa, for example, can fetch $173 per acre, on average, for the general program.

The U.S. average is $78 per acre. Average rates vary by program component, in addition to by location — more information is available from the Farm Service Agency.

Rental rates can also change with each farm bill reauthorization. These rates are set as a percentage of the cash rental rate, which is the county average rent per acre a landowner could get if they rented to an agricultural producer. In the 2018 farm bill, the general conservation program rate was lowered from 110% of the cash rental rate to 85% — a reduction of 25 percentage points. The latest average cash rents by county are available from the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Acreage caps

Farm bills cap the number of acres that can be included in conservation programs at any given time. Individual producers apply to have part or all of their land conserved.

While there is no limit to the number of acres an individual producer can apply for, no more than 27 million acres can be enrolled across the country, as of the most recent farm bill. For comparison, agricultural producers own about 900 million acres of land, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Federal legislators may raise or lower the cap during farm bill reauthorization. This was a point of debate in 2014, when that year’s farm bill reduced the cap from 32 million acres to 24 million acres, and in 2018, when the cap was raised to its current level.

Participation peaked in 2007 at nearly 37 million acres, according to research published in February 2020 in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy.

“In no year has CRP met its farm bill acreage cap and acreage enrolled has fallen off significantly in recent years,” according to a March 2022 report from farmdocDaily, an online publication focusing on agricultural issues, published by the University of Illinois.

According to the January 2022 report from the Congressional Research Service, it is mostly a lack of federal dollars, not a lack of interest, that keeps producers from participating, particularly in the technical assistance programs.

Less than one-third of Environmental Quality Incentives Program applications were approved in 2021, compared with nine in ten general conservation program applications, the report finds.

“Arguments for expanding conservation programs in earlier farm bills were persuasive in light of evidence that large backlogs of interested and eligible producers were unable to enroll due to a lack of funds,” according to the report. “Debate on a new farm bill could see similar arguments.”

Conservation opportunity costs

Much of the research on the effectiveness of farm bill conservation programs focuses on outcomes and opportunity costs in specific states or groups of states in the especially fertile areas of the U.S. — primarily the Midwest.

Opportunity costs are what is given up when a choice is made. For agricultural producers, the cost of conservation is producing food for sale. The February 2020 paper in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy explores opportunity costs in Kansas — specifically, whether conservation rental payments push land values up enough to counteract foregone crop sales, or whether the contracts hurt land values.

The authors analyze land parcel sales in the state spanning 1998 to 2014. They find sales of land with existing conservation contracts sell for 7% less on average than similar parcels without contracts. The buyer is discounted some money on the sale because they can’t farm it for a period of time.

The discount vanishes depending on years remaining on the contract and land quality.

“During years when it is likely a contract is up for renewal, parcels with CRP will sell with either no discount or a slight premium,” the authors write. “For land with relatively low productivity, as demonstrated by land sales in northwestern and north central Kansas, parcels with CRP sell with little to no discount.

Michigan State University agricultural economist Scott Swinton describes the conservation-versus-production decision making process in a November 2021 paper, also published in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy:

“Farmers weigh two kinds of costs when deciding whether to participate in a conservation program. The first covers the direct costs of variable inputs and equipment. The second is the opportunity cost of giving up income from a current activity, such as crop production or live-stock grazing. Opportunity cost can be large, especially when shifting an entire field into a land retirement program.”

Because agricultural producers have more precise geospatial maps land than ever before, they may be able to fine-tune less productive parts of parcels set aside for conservation, Swinton suggests. There may also be opportunities for conservation within productive land, such as incorporating native plant life within crop fields, he adds.

“Looking ahead to the next Farm Bill in 2023, the public priorities, scientific evidence, and technological innovation point toward a role for precision conservation,” Swinton writes.

Source list

The Unintended Benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program for Air Quality
Douglas Becker, Alexander Maas, Jude Bayham and James Crooks. Geohealth, October 2022.

Mapping the Farm Bill: Reviewing the CRP; Law, Land & History
Jonathan Coppess and Christopher Laingen. farmdocDaily, March 2022.

Precision Conservation: Linking Set-Aside and Working Lands Policy
Scott Swinton. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, February 2022.

Farm Bill Primer: Conservation Title
Congressional Research Service, January 2022.

Increasing Durability of Voluntary Conservation through Strategic Implementation of the Conservation Reserve Program
Daniel Sullins, et al. Biological Conservation, July 2021.

Water Quality Related to Conservation Reserve Program and Cropland Areas: Evidence from Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing
Dameng Yin, et al. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, April 2021.

Thinking Like a Grassland: Challenges and Opportunities for Biodiversity Conservation in the Great Plains of North America
David Augustine, Ana Davidson, Kristin Dickinson and Bill Van Pelt. Rangeland Ecology & Management, September 2021.

The Opportunity Cost of the Conservation Reserve Program: A Kansas Land Example
Mykel Taylor, Nathan Hendricks, Gabriel Sampson and Dillon Garr. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, February 2020.

Further reading

Competing Farm Programs: Does the Introduction of a Risk Management Program Reduce the Enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program?
Jisang Yu, Brittney Goodrich and Atticus Graven. Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, September 2022.

Would Farmers Benefit from Removing More Land from Production in the Next Farm Bill?
Nathan Hendricks. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, March 2022.

Land Use Decisions after the Conservation Research Program: Re-enrollment, Reversion, and Persistence in the Southern Great Plains
Jessica Barnes. Conservation Science and Practice, July 2020.

Eastern Grasslands: Conservation Challenges and Opportunities on Private Lands
Patrick Keyser, et al. Wildlife Society Bulletin, September 2019.

Evaluating the Role of Farm Bill Conservation Program Participation in Conserving America’s Grasslands
Lily Sweikert and Larry Gigliotti. Land Use Policy, February 2019.

The post Environmental conservation in the farm bill: A research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The farm bill is wide-ranging legislation that sets funding and directs priorities for a variety of federal food consumption and production programs in the U.S., including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.

Congress usually debates and renews the farm bill every five years. The first farm bill was passed in 1933, with 18 farm bills having been passed in all. The most recent farm bill passed as the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 — meaning it expires at the end September, which marks the end of the federal fiscal year.

Over the coming weeks, legislators will make the case for the next farm bill to include funding that supports the interests of their constituents, as well as lobbying and advocacy groups. To help guide journalists in coverage of those debates, The Journalist’s Resource is taking a look at academic research on three pillars of farm bills: SNAP, environmental conservation and rural development.

The research featured in this miniseries can inform the questions that journalists at local, regional and national outlets ask of federal lawmakers.

This week, we’re focusing on SNAP.

SNAP typically gets the largest funding share of any program in the farm bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimates roughly $120 billion in SNAP spending per year over the coming decade. The number of people who get SNAP benefits tends to rise or fall along with the unemployment rate.

“SNAP serves a large and diverse caseload, with substantial shares comprising low-income working families with children, elderly and disabled people, and very low-income individuals with substantial barriers to employment,” according to a November 2022 Congressional Research Service report.

To qualify for SNAP benefits, households have to be at or below 130% of the federal poverty line — this comes out to about $2,500 a month for a family of three, according to a 2023 analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank.

States also play a critical role in providing SNAP benefits and determining who qualifies.

“State agencies are responsible for general program administration and ensuring program integrity,” according to USDA. “State agencies determine the eligibility of individuals and households to receive SNAP benefits, and issue monthly allotments of benefits.”

In April 2023, the most recent month for which data is available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly 42 million people received SNAP benefits. An emergency expansion of benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant an additional $82 per month on average for qualifying households, expired in March 2023. Nationally, the average monthly SNAP benefit was $230 in 2022, up from $130 in 2019.

SNAP falls under the nutrition policy area of the farm bill, which is administered by USDA. It affects the most number of people of any farm bill program, and it is hotly debated in Congress and in the news media.

SNAP work requirements

Work requirements for SNAP participants usually garner widespread news coverage as the farm bill comes due for reconsideration in Congress. These federally mandated work requirements apply to “able-bodied adults without dependents,” or ABAWDs in government lingo.

SNAP participants who can work and don’t have a dependent are required to work at least 80 hours per month to qualify for food benefits. Participants subject to work requirements don’t necessarily have to work for pay — volunteer work, unpaid work or work in exchange for something other than money all count.

As part of negotiations over the debt ceiling earlier this year, SNAP participants age 18 to 54 will be subject to work requirements by Oct. 1, 2024. Upper ages for work requirements are phasing in over time. The age increased to 50 in early September. It will go up to 52 in October, then to 54 next fall. These caps are legislated to stay in place through 2030.

Some Republicans want to raise the age to 65. Work requirements were first introduced in 1996.

Context from research

It is critical for journalists who want to cover this topic comprehensively to have a sense of recent academic research on the effectiveness of work requirements and whether SNAP in general enables people with low income to purchase food they otherwise might not be able to afford.

Here is important context journalists should consider adding to any story on the SNAP debate:

• Only about 13% of SNAP participants are subject to work requirements, according to a 2022 USDA report. The figure was 12% in 2019, before the pandemic-related benefit expansion, according to a 2023 analysis from Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.
• At the same time, people aged 50 to 64 are the fastest growing group of SNAP participants, and able bodied people in that age range outnumber those aged 18 to 49, according to Rachidi’s analysis, which was co-written with Thomas O’Rourke of AEI.
• Demographic context can help frame policy proposals. Pre-pandemic, from October 2019 to February 2020, 38% of SNAP participants were white, 26% were Black, 15% were Hispanic, 3% were Asian and a little over 1% were Native American, according to the USDA. Those figures were roughly the same during the early months of the pandemic.

Federal spending on SNAP is miniscule compared with other social safety net programs. By comparison, social security spending was $1.2 trillion in 2022 while Medicare and Medicaid spending was $1.3 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Federally, SNAP cost about $120 billion in 2022, including $114 billion in benefit payments, according to USDA. Overall, SNAP spending makes up between 1% and 2% of all federal spending yearly.

“While the overall social safety net in recent decades has shifted to provide either work-contingent assistance or assistance targeted to specific categories of people, SNAP is the only social benefits program available to all low-income Americans,” writes Northwestern University economist Dianne Whitmore Schanzenbach in one of the papers featured below.

Keep reading for more insights from recent research on work requirements, online SNAP purchases, the major role state policies play when it comes to SNAP participation, and what happened to SNAP participants in a food desert when a full-service grocery store opened nearby.

Research roundup

Employed in a SNAP? The Impact of Work Requirements on Program Participation and Labor Supply
Colin Gray, et al. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023.

The study: Focusing on people who can work and do not have dependents, the authors use a sample of more than 90,000 Virginians who likely would be on SNAP absent work requirements. Virginia suspended SNAP work requirements from 2009 to 2013, during the Great Recession. The authors follow the data on people enrolled in SNAP at the end of this period to see if they stayed in the program after the work requirements were put back in place. The sample represents just 9% of all people in the state receiving SNAP at the time — meaning most people in the program were not able to work or had dependents and were not subject to the work requirements. The work requirements, in other words, affected a small subset of the overall SNAP population.

The findings: A year and a half after the work requirements were reinstated, 37% of prior SNAP participants were no longer on the rolls. People who were homeless or had no income were most affected, the authors find. During the period studied, people age 50 and above were not subject to the work requirements. The authors find a “sharp positive increase in participation at age 50,” which they associate with an overall decrease in participation due to the work requirements of roughly 23 percentage points.

They determine the decline is due to people failing to meet work requirements, not because of excessive paperwork needed to recertify for the program. Crucially, the authors find work requirements do not lead to more labor force “attachment,” a word economists use to describe whether someone has the resources, professional connections and skills to find a job relatively easily.

In other words, work requirements do not appear to make it more or less likely someone will be employed after they are off SNAP, according to the findings. The authors suggest that work requirements may not address “underlying barriers to work,” though they note their results may not apply to other states.

The authors write: “We find that work requirements induce disproportionately higher exit among beneficiaries who are documented to be homeless or to have no earned income prior to the reinstatement of work requirements. In contrast, induced exit is disproportionately lower among those with a history of disability, who are more likely to be exempt from the work requirements.”

Understanding SNAP: An Overview of Recent Research
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. Food Policy, January 2023.

The study: The author examines the findings from 17 papers published from 1988 to 2021 that investigate how SNAP benefits affect labor market outcomes nationally and in specific states, as well as personal food consumption, whether the benefits are adequate to meet nutritional needs, the administrative costs of applying for and staying in SNAP, and how SNAP benefits affect individual health and well-being.

The findings: Research finds higher SNAP benefits during the Great Recession led participants to quickly increase their food spending at home, with other research finding “the temporary SNAP increase had a larger per-dollar fiscal stimulus than any other spending increase or tax cut that was enacted to combat the Great Recession.”

In Michigan, research finds people often lose SNAP benefits at times when they are required to report income to an administrative office. Some drop-off may be due to people finding jobs that pay too much for them to qualify, but the research finds about half of people were still eligible and simply missed the deadline. New case management software simplified the process and exits fell 12%, the research finds.

Toward the end of a benefit month, SNAP beneficiaries may be at risk of not eating enough food, defined as less than half of their recommended daily caloric intake, other research finds. Likewise, another paper finds at the end of the month SNAP beneficiaries spend less time grocery shopping and making food at home than earlier in the month. When SNAP payments were disbursed later in the month, further from the time when other expenses such as rent are typically due, food spending is more consistent, other research finds.

SNAP beneficiaries report better health and fewer visits to the doctor when they are able to use the program, research finds. In another paper, elementary and middle school students in South Carolina score slightly lower on math tests when it’s been more than 26 days since their families received SNAP benefits. For children, food programs such as SNAP general improve nutrition and reduce the likelihood of hunger, research finds.

The author writes: “[SNAP] alleviates food hardship, and in some cases improves nutrition quality. While negative work incentive effects are inescapable, the impacts on employment and hours worked are modest. That may be partly because program participation improves a range of health outcomes in both adults and children.”

An Analysis of SNAP Online Purchasing Behavior in California: A Review of the First 7 Months of Program Implementation and Lessons Learned
Isabelle Foster, et al. American Journal of Health Promotion, October 2022.

The study: This research is among the first to analyze an online SNAP purchasing program.  In April 2020, California joined the ranks of states that offer SNAP participants the ability to buy groceries online. (A pilot program included in the 2014 farm bill made online buying available in a handful of states, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the rollout. Today, every state and the District of Columbia is authorized to offer SNAP purchases online.)

The goal of the pilot was to give SNAP participants a way to buy food with their benefit when there were few or no local grocers that accept SNAP. The authors note some challenges SNAP participants face in buying food online, including that their benefit cannot be used to cover shipping and delivery. They analyze the number of purchases per month, excluding returns or invalid transactions, across California’s 58 counties during the first 7 months of CalFresh, the name for the online SNAP program there. Amazon and Walmart were the only approved CalFresh retailers during this time.

The findings: Per county there were a median of 665 monthly online SNAP purchases from April to October 2020. There were about 1.7 million CalFresh transactions during this time, worth about $112 million and accounting for nearly 1% of all SNAP purchases in the state. Across the period studied there were about 875,000 purchases worth $46 million, with an average basket value of $53 from Amazon. From Walmart, there were 893,000 purchases worth $66 million, with an average basket value of $73.

CalFresh participation consistently increased from April to August for urban, suburban and rural counties, but purchases slowed in rural areas after August. SNAP participants living in the four rural California counties had the lowest rate of online food purchases. There were no Walmart stores in the rural counties during the period studied, and Amazon Fresh did not deliver to them. The authors note that before CalFresh, one in five SNAP dollars was spent at Walmart, so it may have been easier for the retailer to advertise the new online shopping option to its existing SNAP customers.

The authors write: “Consistent with in-person purchases, shopping trends at each retailer varied across the benefit month. Spending decreased during the third week of each month, and then increased through the first and second weeks. This likely coincides with California’s benefits issuance timeline, which staggers CalFresh dispersal from the first to the 10th day of the month.”

Do SNAP Work Requirements Work?
Timothy Harris. Economic Inquiry, September 2020.

The study: Starting in 2010, as part of recovery efforts following the economic shock of the Great Recession, states were allowed to apply for waivers from federal SNAP work requirements if their economies were not doing well — for example, if the state unemployment rate was over 10% for a year. Fourteen states kept work requirements in place, even though they qualified for waivers, according to the author.

States could also apply on behalf of individual counties. From 2011 to 2017, economic conditions improved in some counties with waived work requirements, meaning SNAP participants in those areas had to again comply with the work requirements to receive benefits. The author uses these geographic and time variations to study employment differences between people who get SNAP — with and without work requirements.

The findings: Among SNAP participants who were able to work, did not have dependents and were subject to work requirements, employment rates were 1.3 percentage points higher than those who got SNAP without the work requirement.

Likewise, SNAP participation fell 1.7 percentage points with the work requirement — workers without a high school diploma were the most likely to lose benefits. In sum, more people were employed and fewer were on the SNAP rolls with the work requirement than without. The author notes that the yearly dollar value of SNAP is small compared with other social welfare programs, such as Medicaid, and that people will have stronger incentives to find work larger the value of a lost benefit.

The author writes: “Arguably, ABAWDs should be the most responsive to work requirements as they do not have dependents at home, have no disabilities, and are of working age. Policies that seek to expand work requirements to other households — such as those with dependents — likely will have smaller employment effects than those found in this study.”

The Downs and Ups of the SNAP Caseload: What Matters?
Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Katie Fitzpatrick, Brian Stacy and Laura Tiehen. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, September 2020.

The study: The 2002 and 2008 farm bills gave states wide leeway in deciding who qualifies for SNAP benefits. The “legislative and regulatory changes gave states increased flexibility to simplify program administration and increase program access, especially for low income working families,” the authors write.

They use detailed administrative data to track how SNAP participation changed from 1990 to 2016 as states enacted policies at various times related to eligibility, stigma and transaction costs.

These policy changes included:

• Removing personal vehicles from asset tallies used to determine eligibility — by 2016, every state allowed applicants to not count at least one vehicle as an asset.
• Increased outreach beginning in the 2000s, as the federal government began reimbursing states for half their costs related to public education, including TV and radio advertising.
• Differences by state in the number of months SNAP participants were given between having to recertify their eligibility.
• Fingerprinting requirements for SNAP participants. By 2001, Arizona, California, Texas and New York required fingerprinting. Those states made up roughly 25% of the national SNAP caseload. No states currently require fingerprints for SNAP.
• The rollout beginning in 1989 in Maryland of electronic benefit transfer cards, which look like traditional credit cards. Every state used these cards by 2004.

The authors also simulate what SNAP caseloads would have been like if eligibility requirements had been the same across states from 2000 to 2016. In this paper, changes in “caseloads” refers to changes the number of SNAP participants.  

The findings: When states mandated shorter timeframes between recertification periods their caseloads declined, relative to when states offered longer timeframes.

EBT rollout, conversely, increased caseloads, as stigma fell related to using SNAP benefits. Exempting one or more vehicles from asset tests also slightly increased caseloads after two years. Fingerprinting requirements led to a relatively sharp drop in caseloads over two years. Advertising on TV and radio increased the proportion of SNAP participants in states that rolled out those campaigns.

From 2000 to 2016, if the federal government had mandated states keep eligibility requirements in place in 2000, the national growth in SNAP participation would have been 38% smaller, the authors estimate.

The authors write: “Broad-based categorical eligibility policies were a subject of heated debate in the farm bills of 2014 and 2018 and our estimates suggest that they do have an important relationship with caseload growth, increasing the caseload by approximately 10% after two years. Work requirements for ABAWDs, another policy receiving a great deal of attention, is negatively related to caseload growth, suggesting that increasing these requirements would lead to steep caseload declines.”

SNAP Participants Improved Food Security and Diet After a Full-Service Supermarket Opened in an Urban Food Desert
Jonathan Cantor, et al. Health Affairs, August 2020.

The study: The authors examine what happened to nutrition in low-income households when two federal programs, SNAP and the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, overlapped in one U.S. city — Pittsburgh.

HFFI in part focuses on funding new, large, full-service supermarkets in food deserts. In cities, food deserts are usually defined as areas where about one third of the population lives more than one mile from a supermarket. The authors note past research that finds smaller food stores that accept SNAP tend to stock fewer nutritious, healthy offerings than larger grocers.

They surveyed a sample of 195 SNAP participants in Pittsburgh’s Hill District before and after the HFFI-funded supermarket opened there in October 2013. The Hill District had been a food desert for decades prior to the opening of the new supermarkert. For comparison, the authors also surveyed 85 SNAP participants in another Pittsburgh food desert neighborhood with similar demographics — roughly 95% Black and 80% female — that did not get a new supermarket during the study period.

The findings: Survey participants in the neighborhood where the new supermarket opened reported feeling more secure in their ability to get enough food, while this measure was unchanged in the comparison neighborhood. They also reduced their sugar intake, compared with the comparison neighborhood, by nearly 3.5 teaspoons per day.

(The full-service supermarket in the Hill District, a Shop ‘n Save, closed in March 2019. In April 2023, the city approved the development of a new supermarket in the area, with the owners aiming to open by the end of the year.)

The authors write: “This is the first study to indicate that the introduction of a full-service supermarket into a food desert can improve both food security and diet among SNAP participants. The results indicate that such placement may be an effective policy to heighten the impact of a long-standing federal food and nutrition program — in this instance, SNAP — in communities with limited access to healthy food choices.”

Further reading

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: History, Politics and Public Health Implications
Marion Nestle. American Journal of Public Health, November 2019.

US Farm Bills and the ‘National Interest’: An Historical Research Paper
Nadine Lehrer. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, July 2018.

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