Agricultural workers’ employment cycles and churn in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: A descriptive analysis

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a safety net for 41 million low-income people in the United States. Although 80% of all eligible individuals participate, SNAP eligible agricultural workers likely participate in SNAP at about half that rate. Agricultural workers may be less attached to the safety net because seasonal employment makes administrative burdens more salient and can induce variation in eligibility. In this paper we examine how seasonality affects farmworker attachment to SNAP. We measure households’ attachment to SNAP with churn rates. Churn occurs when a household exits SNAP and subsequently re-enters the program within 3 months. With household-level administrative data from Fresno County as a case study, we provide descriptive evidence that farmworkers are more likely to churn than other SNAP participants. SNAP churn among farmworkers increases significantly when agricultural employment falls after seasonal peaks, particularly for crop production and support activities. We estimate a seasonal pattern in churn for farmworkers that does not exist for non-farmworkers, indicating that the patterns we observe cannot be explained by baseline seasonality alone. Understanding the relationship between churn and the seasonality of agricultural employment has the potential to improve access to the safety net for a vulnerable population, as well as reduce SNAP related costs for both households and the state.