![]() It started reducing the support prices and buying less stock, but that didn’t have a huge impact. ” RELATED: Why Seasonality Matters for Cheese But most folks weren’t very happy with that kind of operation, and it was costly. ![]() You ended up with prices not able to move out of either end of the spectrum,” explains Scott Brown, an agricultural economist at the University of Missouri. “This is especially true during the 1980s. The USDA buying up cheese prevented the prices from dipping too low-but the department also put a ceiling on how high the prices could climb. Then, once the prices of dairy products hit 125 percent of the support price, the USDA would start selling off its stash in bulk. The result? The dairy market would stabilize, producers would have steady income and prices for the products would eventually rise. It bought millions of pounds of cheese, butter and dry milk from producers who would otherwise have lost a lot of money if they only relied on their regular retailers. When the price of dairy products sunk too low for farmers, the USDA would offer to buy up the excess at a stable rate. In 1949, the USDA introduced the Dairy Product Price Support Program, later known as the Milk Price Support Program. But because milk has a pretty short shelf life, it couldn’t do much with the actual liquid product.Ĭanada’s Wildfires Threaten Its Farmers From All Sides To help, the government looked for ways to step in and calm the market. ![]() It also doesn’t help that milk production naturally rises in the spring calving season, but demand for milk is generally at its highest in the fall, when the school year starts again. The price of milk has always been volatile, jumping up and down based on limited supply and fluctuating demand. The answer to that question has two parts: why it started and why it’s still doing it. A set of caves along Interstate 435 offered a convenient cold-storage option.īut still, caves aside, why is the government in the decades-long habit of hoarding cheese in the first place? The USDA has a large presence in Kansas City, Missouri, and when it found itself with millions of pounds of surplus dairy and needed a safe, climate-controlled place to put it all, it started to search locally. If you had millions of pounds of cheese-along with butter and dry-milk powders-where would you keep it? If you’re the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the answer is obvious: in a series of caves outside Springfield, Missouri. ![]()
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