The United States has a cheese surplus of 1.39 billion pounds. Let's try to visualize that.

There is a lot of uncertainty in life. So, here's a comforting thought: America's United States will not miss cheese soon.

As the Washington Post reports, US dairy farmers now have a huge surplus of 1.39 billion pounds of cheese. It is the largest national reserve of varieties of cheddar cheese, Swiss, American and others. There is enough excess cheese to arm every American citizen with a good amount of 4.6 pounds of friable, melting and salty substance.

You might ask yourself: Why the massive stock of cheese? There is a bigger story here: American dairy farmers have been overproducing milk. When there is a surplus of milk, it turns into cheese, which can be stored longer before spoiling. La Poste points out that excess milk and cheese tend to cap during the summer months when demand for dairy products is declining. In addition, cows – who are more efficient milk producers than ever, thanks to selective breeding – generate the most milk in the spring.

This trend is not new: as Brad Plumer reported in 2016, the US dairy industry has been overproduced for years. (In 2016, the US Department of Agriculture purchased millions of dollars of cheese to help ease the surplus.)

The US dairy market is certainly interesting, but here's what we really wanted to know: What does more than a billion pounds of cheese look like? Extrapolating from the density of this popular cheddar brand, 1.39 billion pounds of cheese about occupies 900,303 cubic yards. It's a cheese mountain, comparable in size to the US Capitol Building.

Javier Zarracina / Vox

And what a glorious spectacle it would be.

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