Pandemics, economic woes: Turner Dairy Farms still 'figures it out' 90 years later
Ninety Aprils ago, a young Charlie Turner proposed to a widow who lived on a Penn Hills farm.
The year was 1930. At age 25, and after 12 years of working on his dad’s farm in Wilkinsburg, Turner was ready for a life change. He had just five possessions: four cows and a car.
So he drove the car one day to “the country” in Penn Hills, where he found the widow’s 67-acre farm. Her husband had died years earlier in a mining accident. Through the Great Depression, she struggled to pay the farm’s property taxes, posing a risk of losing it all.
Turner’s proposal was not romantic — that came later to a woman named Lydia. But it was beneficial to both. Would she let him operate a dairy farm if he agreed to pay the property taxes?
It was a win-win. She could keep the family farm so he could launch what has become one of Western Pennsylvania’s most beloved milk processors: Turner Dairy Farms.
The widow’s name was Mary Etta Frye. She died in 1958 at the age of 78.
Her daughter, Grace Frye, became Turner’s first business partner.
The family is not sure how Turner learned of the Penn Hills farm’s financial situation, but one thing is clear. Turner Dairy Farms, which turned 90 in April, has seen some changes.
Turner Dairy Farms: a brief history
Turner started his new business by peddling bottles of milk labeled “Chas G. Turner” and then later just “Turner’s” from his car. As his four cows gave him calves, the business grew.
Frye and Turner acquired more properties to expand farming operations. By 1953, the company was incorporated as Turner Dairy Farms.
Turner had made a name for himself and his company by the late 1950s and ‘60s, having had a hand in forming the Penn Hills Chamber of Commerce in 1956 and the Penn Hills Service Association in 1959. He also joined Cal Crawford, a construction mogul; Ed Dardanell, a newspaper publisher and politician; and Dr. Gene Conti in 1973 to form an alliance between two competing health systems along Forbes Road in Monroeville. Their efforts led to the construction of Forbes Hospital in 1978.
Before door-to-door milk deliveries phased out of Turner’s business plan in the 1980s, the company had 44 routes. In the 1990s, the way people got their milk continued to change, putting a strain on dairy farmers. It became very expensive for Turner Dairy Farms to milk cows.
So in 1998, the company stopped milking cows. Instead, they relied on a wholesale market that demanded milk products in bulk. The company became a milk processing facility.
That idea came from Chuck Turner Jr., one of the founder’s grandsons. He now serves as president of Turner Dairy Farms and shares ownership with 14 other family members. He started working for the company fresh out of college in 1986, when he graduated from Penn State with a degree in food science.
“Nobody wanted to stop doing it,” Turner Jr., 55, said. “But it’s a competitive industry.”
Turner Jr. grew up helping on the farm. His first memorable experience, as an 8-year-old, was sticking labels on packages of pork sausage alongside Grace Frye, who would have been in her 70s. Turner Dairy Farms, at the time, owned a hog farm and ran a USDA packing house on a property in Murrysville.
Thinking back to that experience, Turner Jr. remembers sitting between his grandfather and Grace Frye on car rides between farms.
“Every week it was the same argument: ‘Charlie, if you insist on paying me after all we’ve been through together and all you’ve done for me, I quit!’ ‘Grace, if I can’t pay you after all we’ve been through together and all you’ve done for me, you’re fired!’” Turner Jr. said.
Grace Frye continued to live on the Penn Hills farm and work for the company up until her death in 1991 at age 90.
“A member of our family her whole life,” Turner Jr. said.
His grandfather was 89 when he died a year before Grace Frye. But the company continued on with the family.
Market changes
The move from being a dairy farm to a dairy processing facility in the late 1990s meant Turner Dairy Farms could stay alive as a business.
Even before the pandemic hit, milk farming in Pennsylvania has suffered a downturn in recent years because of a national glut of milk, a decline in foreign exports and societal shifts to low-fat milk and other products, such as milk derived from nuts.
The changes have resulted in a liquidation of dairy farms across the state.
From 2016 to 2019, the state lost 15% of its dairy farms, leaving Pennsylvania with a total of 5,730 today, according to the Center for Dairy Excellence and a 2020 USDA report.
The year resulting in the most closures was 2018 to 2019, with 470 dairy farms in Pennsylvania shuttered. Nationally, that number was 3,281.
Pandemics – then and now
Charlie Turner was still school-aged when the 1918 influenza pandemic closed schools, infected a third of the world’s population and killed around 50 million.
He was forced to drop out during the flu to help his father run his Wilkinsburg farm, “FM Turner Dairy.” He was around 14 at the time.
It’s the kind of story the owners tell with pride – knowing the experience instilled grit and compassion into Turner Dairy Farms’ DNA.
The covid-19 pandemic has infected more than just humans, gripping nearly every part of today’s economy. Dairy farmers are no exception. Schools and restaurants have stopped or slowed the purchase of milk and cheese, forcing some farmers in Pennsylvania to dump milk.
Turner Jr. said the company has not had to dump milk. He also hasn’t ordered farmers to dump milk. The processing facility has, however, had to pitch a few hundred cases of 5-pound sour cream containers because the product couldn’t be sold.
And the pandemic has hit them in other ways, such as temporarily halting sales to their approximately 100 school districts in the region and several colleges. Turner’s also halted sales to restaurants. The milk processing facility has shifted to focus sales on retail grocers and hospitals. To avoid waste, Turner’s has donated more items to 17 food banks in the region.
But Turner Jr. considers the family business’s position amid the economic shut down “a blessing.” It hasn’t had to lay off any of its 205-employee staff, thanks to a Paycheck Protection Program loan from the Small Business Administration, he said.
And Turner’s has experienced recent success with its launch of a new limited edition birthday cake-flavored milk — an homage to the company’s 90th anniversary held in April.
The limited-edition milk products are something Turner’s started churning out five years ago, but the birthday cake flavor happened to be scheduled to hit the stores in early April, smack down in the middle of a global pandemic.
“We’d never want to do a product launch like this,” Turner Jr. said. “But it’s selling really well.”
Today, the facility manages to process a little more than 200,000 gallons of milk and tea every week – the company began producing its iconic iced tea products in the summer of 1972. They source the milk from 36 dairy farms within 70 miles of its Penn Hills facility.
Turner’s president said it’s comforting knowing the company’s customers still “trust us to be part of their meal and snack times.”
“We’ve been through all this and more — depression, gas shortages … I’m confident we’ll figure it out,” Turner Jr. said.
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