Advertisement There's a massive cheese surplus in America right now Share Shares Copy Link Copy

You gouda brie kidding!Despite the fact that Americans are eating more cheese than ever, there appears to be a surplus of it.Americans ate about 37 pounds per capita of cheese in 2017.But that apparently is not enough to make a dent in the roughly 1.4 billion pounds of cheese surplus the country has, according to WBUR."Part of it is just the amount of milk being produced on farms," Cornell University professor of agricultural economics Andrew Novakovic said. "Part of it is changes in the domestic use of that milk."NPR estimated that there now is enough cheese in refrigerated storage to wrap around the U.S. Capitol.Mozzarella is the most produced and most consumed cheese, Novakovic said.What's changed in the cheese business to create the surplus?"People are turning away from processed cheese," Novakovic said. "It's also the case that we're seeing increased sales of kind of more exotic, specialty, European-style cheeses. Some of those are made in the U.S. A lot of them aren't."But the increase of imported cheese is nothing new."The move towards the more exotic, specialty-type cheeses has been happening now for a few years, and so there's been more people expanding into that area," Novakovic said. "But as you might imagine, it's a little trickier making those cheeses, and a very large commercial firm that's set up to put out large volumes of commodity-type cheese doesn't easily get into saying, 'Well, how about we make some Camembert?' And so, that transition has been ongoing, but it's a little on the slow side."It seems a surplus could be good news for cheese consumers."It's the same as it is for everything else: If you've got too much of something, the price has to go down until consumption rises," Novakovic said.Analysts have downplayed the impact the U.S. trade disputes with Mexico and Canada could have on the dairy industry.The Dairy Export Council said the impact is small, and that only about 6 percent of cheese produced in America is exported.So the excess cheese ultimately comes back to impact dairy farmers, who have consolidated and closed farms over the last 40 years.The Wall Street Journal said in Wisconsin, alone, hundreds of dairy farms closed last year."A lot of farmers would say, 'Well, make it stop,'" Novakovic said. "But the fact of the matter is we're still pushing out a little bit more milk than we know what to do with. And really, it's not a big number, but until those two numbers get reconciled, we're going to continue to see these low prices.