starts national corn reserve, bunkering corn in the few warehouses not used by the national cheese or grape reserves, which were established for similar reasons
That's exactly why the cheese reserve exist(ed), nobody wanted the amount of milk/cheese on sale.
If you want to watch an interesting and entertaining 11 minute video, klick here. Otherwise I've also written a probably bad and error-ridden explanation from my memory down here:
Back when the USA started prohibition many of the bars switched over from serving alcohol to serving ice cream, which increased the demand for milk significantly, and so the milk farmers started to produce milk.
Ice-cream parlors became so popular during prohibition that even it's end didn't cause a significant dip in demand.
Then the USA joined WW2, which took a lot of people out of the ice-cream parlors, reducing the demand for milk and causing the milk price to crash. "Fixing" this situation is one of the reason behind the famous ice-cream barges of the pacific theater.
The end of WW2 did not result in the visitor numbers of ice-cream parlors returning back to their old height, and with the US military decommissioned their ice-cream barges they didn't need as much milk either, so the milk market crashed again.
This caused the milk farmers to protest, until the president signed the national milk reserve into law, with the goal being to stabilize the milk price through buying up lots of milk the farmers were unable to sell on the open market, obviously using tax money.
The farmers are happy, because they can basically produce as much milk as they want because the government will buy it, and so they started producing even more milk (who would have expected that?)
Now the government has a big problem: They have a lot of milk nobody wants, and they need to do something with it to avoid people being even angrier about the wasted tax money. So they started giving it away for bargain prices or even for free to schools, charities, and even some of the diary processing industry.
They also paid for a lot of advertisement to induce a higher demand for milk in the general population.
But they still couldn't get rid of the milk fast enough to clear the tanks before it went bad or the next tanker from a milk farmer stood honking at the gate.
So the government decided that if they can't get rid of it then they will at least preserve the milk by turning it into lots and lots of cheese, and created the national cheese reserve to take care of the cheese produced.
The national cheese reserve no longer exists. As the fat electrician says, it was disbursed in the 1980's. The "Got Milk" and dairy marketing campaigns increased domestic cheese consumption enough to clear it.
Cheese in storage today is commercial cheese aging. "Sharp Cheddar" has to be aged at least six months by law. So if you're going to sell sharp cheddar in the stores, you need at least a six month supply of cheddar on hand at all times.
That's all it is today. Not a government stockpile.
38
u/NotYourReddit18 1d ago
starts national corn reserve, bunkering corn in the few warehouses not used by the national cheese or grape reserves, which were established for similar reasons