Lucky Penny grants fund more than a farm

By Julie Selby & Melinda Stephan

One-woman-band Abbe Turner not only runs a local creamery, but started an initiative that helps families eat together.

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The creamery

Abbe Turner is a small business owner unlike many others. She’s a farmer, a cheese maker and a confectioner. As the co-founder and owner of Lucky Penny Creamery, she also has a number of other responsibilities.

“I am the cheese maker, but as the owner of a small business, I do a lot of other duties too. Some days find us working back on the farm. This morning I was cleaning pens. We do a lot of our own direct store deliveries, and we do our own marketing and sales. I like to have supervision of everything,” Turner said.

Turner and her husband Anderson bought their Garrettsville farm in 2002 “to be a place where art and agriculture connect, and a place to raise our children,” Turner said. “We wanted to raise our children with a healthy respect for the environment and for food.”

Abbe and Anderson decided to open the creamery in 2009 and were licensed as Lucky Penny Creamery in 2010. The Turners have structured their home and business around the principles of simplicity, family and sustainability.

According to Turner, quality is also important, and under her supervision, the creamery has produced a product highly in demand among local restaurants and market-goers.

“At Lucky Penny Creamery we produce about 10,000 pounds of cheese a year. Three species: cow, goat and sheep. I’d actually love to start working with some other species – like maybe camel – but that’s another dream for another day. But we do fresh cheeses and distribute them to about 80 restaurant accounts across Ohio.”

In addition to fresh cheeses, Turner produces cajeta, a traditional caramel confection sauce she described as “simply decadent.” The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition notes that Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) has awarded Turner three grants, including one for a feasibility study for cajeta.

“We’ve been really, really lucky to get a number of grants from a number of funding organizations that have helped us grow and do research, and explore some new product development. In 2009 we actually got a Value Added Producer Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture,” Turner said. “There were only 161 farms that were granted that that year, and what that grant is for is for taking a raw, agricultural product and transforming it in a way that actually brings more dollars.”

The USDA describes these kinds of grants as money intended to help farmers who may be struggling (beginning farmers, or small family farms like the Turners’) gain flexibility by producing new products, marketing those products and increasing the producer’s income.

Public money has helped take Turner’s operation from a local creamery to a business that is only as limited as the owner’s imagination.

“The Value Added Producer Grant actually helped us do a little bit of market development, do some focus groups, and it enabled us to go to the National Fancy Food Show to sample to 10,000 people to get their feedback.”

Distinctive and valued products and the income they generate are not Turner’s only concerns: community is also important to her.

Recycle Pots and Pans

“I’m really, really excited that an initiative that we started many years ago is actually coming to […] fruition. Many years ago I was at a local food funding seminar and there was a non-profit there that was bemoaning the fact that they had just gotten a very expensive refrigerated van and they were loading the van up with all of this local produce from area farms and taking it to lower socioeconomic neighborhoods that might not have had fresh produce: food deserts,” Turner said.

When she didn’t understand why locals weren’t celebrating the fresh food, someone Turner describes as a “very wise gentleman” explained to her that many neighborhood households didn’t have pots and pans to cook with. She fixated on this thought for days, and started to notice the old furniture, appliances and especially cooking utensils students put on curbs when they moved each year, and she couldn’t see why so much valuable kitchenware was ending up in landfills.

“So five years ago we actually started collecting pots and pans and we started a non-profit called Recycle Pots and Pans,” Turner said. “It’s a mechanism to make sure that if families want to eat together and cook together, they have all the appropriate tools to do so. So we collect and redistribute anything used to prepare or enjoy a family meal.”

The initiative

So far this initiative has distributed cooking implements to 125 families, and with a new grant from the Western Reserve Hospital which has enabled Recycle Pots and Pans to become a federally recognized 501(c)(3) with non-profit status, Turner believes they’ll be able to expand.

“In one short month we’ll be opening a location in Columbus to work with two non-profits down there,” Turner said. “The research shows that when families do eat together, there’s lower instances of drugs and alcohol in the household, the kids get better grades, there’s lower obesity.”

A study published in Nutrition Journal agrees with Turner, citing study results indicating that “efforts to boost the healthfulness of the US diet should focus on promoting the preparation of healthy foods at home.”

In a time when subsidies encourage and even require small business owners to diversify, Turner gets grants to fund her varied projects.

“My mechanism might be a little backwards,” Turner said. There are many other projects she would like to see materialize.

Another grant-driven initiative Turner is working on called Food Waste for Farms aims to reduce food waste where possible, and redistribute the unavoidable food waste to feed farm animals or compost.

“There’s many great things to do in the world, and I just encourage people to start doing them.”

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