FOR ARTHUR J. MILBERGER— IT ALL STARTS WITH GRASS

By Suz Trusty

Growing the Business In the early 1950s, FJ quit his day job and expanded from four acres to 84, choosing a site with good water and black gumbo soil. Arthur says, “He started exploring improved grass varieties, testing grasses from Texas A&M. He brought in his first 328 Tifgreen purple tag foundation grass from Dr. Burton with Georgia Crop Improvement in 1956. In 1958, we all moved to the 84-acre property in Bay City, Texas. We had planted a few acres of grass that season, but ran out of time to put in more, so he planted the rest of the acreage to cotton. Tank God, the cotton crop was a wet disaster or FJ might have turned to cotton over turfgrass. Tat cotton tow sack was way too heavy to drag through the gumbo mud!

Arthur and Sue, daughters Regay, Lesley, and Whitney (at top) pose on the home farm turf with two family pups, Toottoot and Muffin, in 1985.

Arthur J. Milberger says, “My family started their sod business in 1947. I was born into the turf business in 1949, and we have remained in it ever since. My Dad, Francis Joseph (FJ), got back from World War II in 1945 and began working for the Texaco distributer. Tere were no commercial turf farms back then, so homeowners didn’t have a quick way to establish a lawn. He saw that as opportunity, comparing the 43,560 square feet to an acre to the average home yard in our area of Texas at 3,000 to 4,000 square feet. He started moonlighting, cutting strips of grass out of front yards, with permission of course, using a straight edge shovel with a turning hoe to cut through the thatch down to the hard clay. He turned that into sod blocks sold during the Texas post-war building boom.

FJ leased several native St. Augustine fields before buying four acres of land in 1950 and building their home on it. He put in over two acres of planting stock from those home lawns, watering them with a four-horsepower gasoline pump and a long canvas hose. Arthur says, “My Mom, Lillian, built and operated a chicken and egg business on the back acre. Tey were unbelievable business partners for the next 70 years.”

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Typical of farming, Arthur and his younger brother, Bryan, worked together with FJ from the time they were old enough to be helpful in the fields. He says, “From those early days on, the only way we moved the business forward was centered on other turfgrass producers first, turf suppliers second, and turf educators- researchers third. Te knowledge we gained from all of them is what propelled our family in the sod production business.”

New sod fields, grown from plugs, did not develop thatch during the first year which made it difficult to harvest the hard clay. So, FJ and Lillian devised a crazy-looking machine that attached to the three point hook-up on a tractor. “A hefty guy sat on the back to add weight to it. It had side coulters with chopping blades that cut into the turf at one foot intervals, and a straight edge plow on back to flip the sod out. In the 1960s we brought in Ryan sod cutters and had 14 or 15 of them working the fields. It took up to 20 men to cut one-foot by one-foot blocks; stack them nine-high to equal one square yard, and load 1,000 of those stacks on the trailer of a truck. We’d send the loaded trucks to Teodore Mund, JR Miller, and Jimmy Anderton,

FJ Milberger in 1971 on the Certified Tifway 419 field, the first certified turf field in Texas. This field has been in continuous certification since 1971.

TPI Turf News January/February 2017