Hundreds of feet below the ground in Missouri, there are hundreds of thousands of pounds of American cheese. Deep in converted limestone mines, caves kept perfectly at 36 degrees Fahrenheit store stockpiles of government-owned cheese comprising the country’s 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese. Courtesy/farmlinkproject

Interesting Facts:

The concept of a strategic reserve is fairly straightforward: A nation stores vast quantities of a product or natural resource that is crucial to its citizens’ well-being in case of an emergency that disrupts the normal flow of such materials to the public.

A prime example is the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which stores hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil for release in the event that war or geopolitical maneuvering drives up prices at the pump. A lesser-known but also immensely important example is the Strategic National Stockpile, which houses supplies of vaccines, medical devices, and personal protective equipment in the event of a biological attack or natural disaster.

But there also are several reserves that, for all the good intentions involved, may leave people scratching their heads. 

Some stockpiles have less to do with strategy than with a lack of means to handle a surplus.

Such was the case in the early 1980s, after the enactment of a $2 billion dairy subsidy left American farmers drowning in excess milk. The federal government bought the leftovers and turned much of it into cheese for storage purposes, leaving the chunks that were not distributed via “government cheese” handouts to languish in warehouses and caves.

While ownership of the stockpile eventually passed into private hands, the government couldn’t quite shake its old habits. In 2016, the USDA announced plans to purchase 11 million pounds of cheese to lessen the strain on private facilities. As of April 2021, there remained 1.4 billion pounds of the stuff in storage, with nary a mouse in sight to tackle the problem head-on.

Source: www.interestingfacts.com