Covid taught us (again) that efficiency is at odds with robustness.

Having nothing in inventory is perfectly efficient, but also perfectly fragile in an environment where a major wheat producer is attacked by a madman.

There has to be a balance, and cheese is easy to store and it improves with age.

Being paid to “overproduce” is equivalent to being paid to add supply chain robustness in this case.

We have been overproducing for decades, and have had many opportunities to decrease the amount of overproduction. Certainly the government should buy surplus milk when the market fluctuates to support the industry, but I think at this point the industry is overproducing on purpose and expecting the government to purchase every bit of overproduction, to increase profits.