The whole point is to eliminate redundancies, and when there are no redundancies, we get empty cheese shelves while farmers dump milk.

They are dumping milk because it is perishable, they can't store it, they can't get it to anyone who wants/can use it.

They have no way to sell their milk except to those processors. The milk is stored in tanks until a truck comes to pick it up. If the truck doesn't come, the cows will still produce milk, but the farmer has no place to store it, and milk is a perishable commodity.

I worked in a small dairy when I was in high school, back in the 1960s. Mostly, I delivered milk in bottles to customers on an early morning milk delivery route, but I also worked at the dairy, too. Each day's production from the herd of dairy cows was processed at that dairy and bottled. Every day. Few dairies operate that way now. The owner of the dairy where I worked knew how much milk he needed to deliver each day, and had a dairy herd that produced about that much on a daily basis.

Today's dairy farms sell the milk from their storage tanks, directly to a dairy processing company. They don't have any other customers. They have no processing equipment. Just tanks.

We sold to a coop who would pick the milk up directly from our tanks. The only time we would have had to dump milk would have been because they refused it for bacteria count or antibiotic violations (which we never had).

But other farmers in the same coop did run afoul of the coop and had them put on a pickup hold for several weeks.

They would just call a local cheese producer and they would come and get the milk, albeit at a lower price. Some of the smaller farms even made their own cheese. It was always kind of scary that they could sell milk after they were caught putting milk with antibiotics into the system (cows are frequently treated for udder infections with locally administered antibiotics - but you are supposed to dump the milk and not put it in your tank).

This was in upstate ny. So there was a way to do it, even under contract.

Sounds like a consumer supply chain issue. I'm up near the headwaters of the cheese supply here in WI, and it's true that some farmers are dumping milk and other farm perishables, since they are only set up to sell to (now closed) restaurant and institutional supply chains, and they don't have anywhere to put the excess. But otherwise, there seems to be plenty of cheese in the stores.

And there’s nothing really funny about it. It’s all in the delivery.

I'd bet Vermont has quite a bit as well.

kidding

I bought cheese in MI yesterday, no shortage that I could see. But, I didn't buy Norwegian Jarlsberger, I got the Swiss Gruyere, and some Vermont white cheddar.

I almost had a meltdown about butter until some came yesterday.

Okay. Jokes about butter melting. 3...2...1

There have been shortages on several grocery items at the store where I shop. Rice, dried beans, flour, yeast to name just a few, not to mention paper products and disinfectants.

Many people are stocking up like they are preparing for the apocalypse. It's going to take some time for supply chains to even out so these shortages won't continue.

The toilet paper thing has gone on for about six weeks now.

Got some last week.

A lot of places now limit it. Sadly, people buy their limit every week.

Also sadly, when this is tamped own the toilet paper manufacturers will hit a real slump until all the excess toilet paper people have bought is flushed out of the system. So to speak.

Saw this on the local news. Nobody to pick, no restaurants to sell to... Now they are just giving it away. You can drive down to Homestead and go out to the farmers fields and pick as much as you want..
Food banks are stocking up and they have no one to pick the stuff. Strange times..
m

My grocery has two separate cases for cheese.

One, over by the milk and eggs, contains commercially packaged cheese (Kraft, Cabot etc.) and there's not much of it left in the cases.

The other cheese case is for small batch, local and imported cheese. There is plenty of those types of cheeses available. Possibly because the price of some of those cheeses is extremely high.

grow it, there's a subsidy
dump it, there's a subsidy
do nothing there's a subsidy

So even if the farmers were able to contract with new cheese producers (1) they likely only have equipment to make the quantity of cheese to meet normal requirements and (2) they might be unwilling to gear up to meet a need that may not exist when the cheese is ready 4 weeks to a year from now.

and so on. Most of those have shut down. The packaging process has to change to redirect the cheese to the supermarkets, which are selling more to people eating at home more - and that's if it's the same types sold in each case.

It will balance out, but it takes time.

Of my diet... Ugggghgg

https://cacheeseguild.org/buy-direct-cheesemakers-and-retailers/

Many cheese makers you can buy direct from and have shipped to you.