Farmers, Too, Benefit from SNAP
Published: Friday, November 21, 2025
As the White House fought not to pay Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to 42 million Americans, it already had ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reopen nearly 2,100 Farm Service Agency county offices to pay farmers and ranchers $3 billion in federal "aid from existing programs."
Just think about that for a one shutdown minute.
The White House ordered thousands of employees to turn the lights on at almost every county FSA across the country to distribute $3 billion to maybe a million or so landowners and farmers even as it fought tooth-and-nail not to pay the legally obligated $8 billion in monthly SNAP benefits to 42 million qualified recipients.
Equally compelling, not one major farm group stood up or spoke out for the SNAP millions while most of their members collected taxpayer billions.
Did farm and ranch leaders forget the enormous impact SNAP spending has on rural America's bottom line?
If so, here are the facts: According to USDA's Economic Research Service, American food buyers spent 24.3 cents of every food dollar for "at-home consumption," in short, for local food, in 2023. SNAP recipients "have similar purchasing habits."
That means that farmers and ranchers, on average, receive a huge economic kick—maybe up to 25%—of SNAP dollars spent locally, according to Dawn Thilmany, a Colorado State University ag economist.
Moreover, she recently told PolitiFact when it sought to confirm that estimate, the percentage "may be even slightly conservative when accounting for SNAP dollars spent at farmers' markets or food retailers that source locally."
Before the government shutdown, SNAP was on track to spend $100 billion nationwide in 2025. As such, farmers and ranchers and rural communities across the country would have seen $20 to $25 billion or so of it spent locally.
That's eight times the economic impact—without one cent of FSA overhead—than the $3 billion in direct farm aid recently handed out to farmers.
So why the silence?
It's not ignorance. Farmers have long known that SNAP and other USDA food assistance deliver crucial urban votes needed to pass every farm bill in the last 60 years. In fact, without the votes of food aid advocates in Congress, there would be no farm bill.
Misinformation, however, on federal food aid programs plays an enormous role in America's beliefs about it. Recently, President Donald Trump said "SNAP benefits ... were given to anybody that would ask" because "Biden went totally crazy" and "gave it to people who were able-bodied ..."
The Nov. 8 New York Times checked those alternative facts and noted that "None of Mr. Trump's numbers are accurate."
First, "The vast majority of recipients, nearly 90% are native-born Americans." Second, the "legislation (that) temporarily and partly suspended longstanding work requirements ... occurred in March 2020, under the Trump administration ..." And, finally, "monthly participation was the highest under Mr. Trump, at more than 46 million people in October 2017," not Joe Biden.
Recently, the conservative network Newsmax reported that "59% of all illegal aliens are collecting food stamps, meaning that most of the people getting food stamps from the U.S. government and the U.S. taxpayer are not even Americans."
Again, Grade A baloney, says Times fact checkers: 96% of all SNAP recipients are U.S. citizens, according to the "latest data" from USDA. That means there's zero chance that "most people getting food stamps ... are not even Americans."
None of these facts, however, explain why farmers and ranchers largely remained silent in the latest SNAP fight. But we do know, in politics, silence often means complicity.
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