Corduroy Orange

It’s tough to believe how much technology goes into our milk.

Really, it shouldn’t be—we live in an age where we’re guaranteed to be able to get milk in any season, any weather, any size, prepackaged and waiting for us at the corner store. But to be in the processing plant at Turner Dairy as company President Chuck Turner, Jr. (grandson of company founder Charles G. Turner) pushes icons on a touch screen to demonstrate how the processing of any particular product can be maneuvered and controlled from a computerized screen, it’s a vivid reminder that we’re a few steps removed from the farm.

And quite honestly, I think when it comes to milk, that’s probably a good thing—especially if, as is the case with Turner’s milk, you know that the raw material came from a family farm within 67 miles of the processing plant in Penn Hills and was pasteurized, homogenized, packed, and shipped by a business that has been family-run since its inception in 1930.

Today, the business sits in a highly residential area of Penn Hills, though Mr. Turner is quick to point out which part of the community came first. “We didn’t decide to locate a dairy in a neighborhood—they decided to locate a neighborhood inside a dairy farm.” A painting on the wall of Turner’s conference room drives home the point: in the 1930’s, this was still the pastoral landscape we imagine when we think of a dairy farm.

Over time, as the landscape surrounding the farm changed, so did the business. You’ll no longer find any cattle on the property, though they kept a small milking herd until as recently as 1998—though the cows’ presence tended to cause a bit of confusion amongst visitors to the plant. “We’d show the cows last, because you don’t want people walking through cattle pasture and then tracking everything back through the processing plant, and no matter how hard we tried to emphasize that very little of our milk came from these cows, there would inevitably be some confusion, ‘How much milk do these cows give?’”

Today, very little of the old homestead remains. In fact, only one structure from the old painting still exists, the house that is at the center of the painting.

Originally owned by Grace Frye and her mother, a widow who rented the farm to Charles Turner beginning in 1930. “His rent was to pay the taxes so they didn’t lose the farm during the depression,” says Chuck, Jr. “Grace became his first employee and was like part of the family.”

Turner Dairy still places an emphasis on family, whether the family of their employees or the families who provide the milk. Chuck explains that they have built relationships with the farms that provide their milk, “Some of them have been working with us for three generations,” and that they know the cows are in good hands. “Cows don’t give milk unless they’re well fed and happy—so it’s in our farmers’ best interests to make sure their cows are happy.”

By weight, the cows that provide their milk get about 60-70% of their diet from grasses, with the remainder provided by grains chopped up and mixed in with the grass so the farmers can guarantee what nutrition their cattle are getting. “It’d be nice if we could count on cows eating nothing but grass all the time,” says Chuck, “But this is Pennsylvania, and, especially during the winter, there’s not enough grass to go around.” He compares the situation with the dairy industry in New Zealand, where dairy farms do shut down milking operations during their winter in order to maintain their cows on an all-grass diet, “but here, that just won’t work.” During the summer, he says, most of the cows do get some time at pasture, and at at least one farm, the cows are raised entirely at pasture during the warmer months.

Turner’s milk is not organic (not that organic milk is guaranteed to be grass-fed; for an insightful look at some of the practices that can constitute organic, read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma), though all of the farmers that supply the milk have pledged to remain rBGH/ rBST free. If one of their cows gets sick, though, they will treat it with antibiotics, though none of the antibiotics will ever make their way into Turner’s milk.

Turner’s on-site laboratory occupies the space where the barn used to be. Turner takes advantage of having their own testing facilities not only to maintain strict quality control standards in terms of making certain that both raw and pasteurized products are acceptably low in their bacterial counts, but to guarantee that all milk they sell is free of antibiotics.

If one of the cows at a farm that supplies Turner gets sick, the farmer will treat it with antibiotics if necessary—but no cow from any of the farms is treated with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and steps are taken to ensure that no traces of antibiotics get into the milk supply. Any cow under treatment is milked separately and her milk is not co-mingled with the rest of the milk from that farm until such time as her milk is shown to be antibiotic-free. If a mistake happens and trace amounts of antibiotics from a cow under treatment do get into the supply, the farm providing the milk will be obligated to pay for all of the milk in the truck at the time—perhaps $10,000 or more.

Additionally, the lab performs a direct microscopic exam to test for bacterial counts. “We’re allowed to accept milk up to 100,000 bacteria per mL from any individual farm; up to 300,000 per mL for co-mingled [milk from multiple farms]. Our standard that we look for is 20,000 each, and we usually come in at half of that.” Which means that the milk Turner accepts raw is typically within the threshold of acceptable bacterial counts for a pasteurized product—the FDA threshold for pasteurized milk is 20,000 per mL. Turner’s standard for pasteurized milk? “300 per mL,” says Chuck, Jr. “But we typically come in at 10, 20, 30.”

If there is a problem detected at the lab within any truckload of milk, the dairy is able to trace it back to an individual farm by means of samples that are taken at each farm when the milk is collected, thereby making it easy to solve a problem at its origin.

Pasteurization involves heating the milk up above 161 F for 26 seconds and cooling it back down below 40 F as quickly as possible. The milk is passed through a plate heat exchanger: many plates stack against each other, each with conduits for the milk to flow through. For the most part, every other plate contains milk being heated or milk being cooled—and in the middle ranges, the milk being cooled heats up the milk that’s being heated. At either end of the spectrum, the hottest temperatures are obtained by alternating milk with hot water and the coolest temperatures are obtained by alternating milk with ice water. By exchanging heat between the hot and cold milk, the older pasteurization machine is 80% energy efficient and the newer is 92% efficient. “Nowadays, they call that green. For us, it just makes sense.”

Homogenization is accomplished through controlling the pressure the milk is held under. Chuck, Jr. shows me a large machine with several valves and dials. “These pistons are driven by a huge electric motor, and we’re putting 2000 lbs of pressure on that milk. What it’s doing is going from 2000 lbs to 500 pounds, and then from 500 pounds to ambient pressure, almost none. The fat globule during the radical drop of pressure is dispersed into thousands of little particles that won’t rise back up.”

Pasteurized and homogenized, the milk is pumped into cold storage until it is packed into cartons. On the day I visited, the filling line was handling orange juice cartons. “How was it that Turner branched out from milk into OJ, iced tea, and so on?” I asked.

“Basically,” said Chuck, Jr., “It was a function of having the equipment: we have the pasteurizer, we have the filling line—it’s just a matter of putting it to more use at times when we’re not using it on milk.”

The cartons whirred past at a blur, filled with a cup of juice each and then sealed with special ovens. A lone worker surveyed the juices, pulling out cartons that were mis-sealed and making certain that the machinery continued to operate properly.

I know I enjoy visiting farms and getting my ingredients directly from the source, but milk is one area where I appreciate having someone process it for me. Even if pasteurization kills enzymes and alters the way the milk coagulates in the cheesemaking process, I appreciate the guarantee that my milk will stay fresh and safe for a week and a half or more after I buy it.

I asked Chuck about the hype surrounding raw milk and his take on raw milk advocacy. “There are benefits to drinking raw milk,” he conceded, “if you can get it fresh and you live near the source. But if you’re driving in from Shadyside and you’re getting milk for neighbors…. The system’s not designed for that.”

Turner’s marketing coordinator, Nicholas Yon, adds, “Listeria’s a pervasive thing that can happen anywhere. The way most of use use milk, the safety afforded by pasteurization far outweighs any benefits from drinking it raw.”

Especially if you can get pasteurized milk that you know for a fact comes from family farms in the Pittsburgh area and can count on having the best of both worlds: modern food safety combined with a local, family-oriented product.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Food Chemistry, Milk, Pittsburgh, Sustainable Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.