Day: December 10, 2025

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State Restrictions on SNAP Map Code

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Here is the R code I used to make up this map for those who want to play around with this at home.

State Restrictions on SNAP in 2026 [Expires December 1 2026]

library(tidyverse)
library(tigris)
library(rvest)
library(ggtext)
library(httr)

session <- session("https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/waivers/foodrestriction",
                   user_agent("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.90 Safari/537.36"))

sh <- read_html(session) %>% html_table() %>% .[[1]]

usst <- states(cb=T, resolution = '20m') %>% shift_geometry()

sh %>%
  left_join(usst, ., join_by(NAME == `State`)) %>%
  ggplot() + geom_sf(aes(fill=`Summary of Request`), color='white', linewidth=0.5) +
  scale_fill_manual(values=RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(11, 'Paired'),
                    labels=\(x) str_wrap(x, width=40)) +
  theme_void() +
  coord_sf(expand = F, crs = 5070) +
  labs(
    title = str_c('<span style="color: ',RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(8, 'Blues')[8],'; font-size: 45pt;">State Restrictions on SNAP</span>'),
    subtitle = 'Restrictions on unhealthy food purchases using SNAP going into in effect in 2026.',
    tag = paste(
      "Andy Arthur,", format(Sys.Date(), format = "%-m/%-d/%y"), "<br />",
      "Source: fns.usda.gov/snap/waivers/foodrestriction"),
  ) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(
    text = element_text(family = "Roboto Condensed", size = 14),
    plot.title = element_textbox(hjust = 0.5, face = "bold", size = 28, margin = margin(0, 0, 1, 0)),
    plot.subtitle = element_textbox(hjust = 0.5, face = "italic", size = 14, margin = margin(0, 0, 10, 0)),
    plot.background = element_rect(fill = "beige", color = NA),
    plot.tag = element_textbox(size = 10, hjust = 1, color = "#555555", maxheight = 0, halign = 1),
    plot.caption = element_text(size = 14, color = "#555555"),
    plot.margin = unit(c(0,1,0,0), "cm"),
    plot.tag.position = c(1, 0.03),
    strip.text = element_text(face='bold', size=16),
    legend.key.height = unit(1, "cm"),
    legend.key.width = unit(1, "cm"),
    legend.direction = "horizontal",
    legend.spacing = unit(3, 'cm'),
    legend.margin = margin(0, 0, 0, 0),
    legend.position.inside = c(0,0)
  ) +
  guides(fill = guide_legend(ncol=1, title = '', override.aes = list(width=1)))

Truth is I’m more excited about the latest issue of Hobby Farms magazine being out then reading the news 📰

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It seems like the same old news stories when I open up the New York Times and NPR. Maybe a continuation of the previous stories of cruelty, corruption and abuse of the Trump administration but it sure seems like there is little actual newsworthy content these days.

Maybe it’s just my deep dive into reading, away from the politics and into homesteading, nature and woods, trying to understand what actually matters in this world, and not the click-baity headlines that dominate the news – those based more on human emotion rather then the science of what is actually around us. While hokiness is a problem when you do deep dive into the rat hole around homesteading, you actually learn a lot about practical things that aren’t just the latest farts of some obscure politician hundreds of miles aways that has no bearing on yourlif unless you are colored or poor.