Royal Dairy models self-sufficient farming
Jun. 2—Key points:
* Royal Dairy, part of Royal Family Farms, hosted a field day highlighting sustainable agricultural practices Friday morning.
* Staff explained that waste products from each branch of the business could be used in a way that cut costs and added efficiency to operations.
* Royal Dairy officials said their goal is to ensure farming is sustainable for coming generations.
ROYAL CITY — Words like "sustainable" and "regenerative agriculture" get tossed around a lot. But a Royal Slope farm recently showed the world how it works in reality.
Royal Dairy, about five miles west of Royal City, hosted the Climate-Smart Dairy Farming: Research & Demonstration Field Day in conjunction with Washington State University. The event demonstrated both the dairy's own methods and some of the technology it's been testing for the university.
"In every way possible, we take our wastes and make them into soil amendments, everything from manure to fruit and cold produce and all that, compost it all down," said Michael Hebdon, the vice president of regenerative agriculture at Royal Dairy. "And then we've partnered with a large group of apple and cherry growers to bring in their retired trees and make biochar out of that, and then blend all that together and get it back onto the farms and fields."
About 30 people came to the field day for a tour of the farm and to see presentations from WSU and Cornell University experts about methane-sensing technology and more efficient methods for converting manure to biogas.
Hebdon drove the visitors around the farm on a flatbed trailer with hay-bale seats, while Royal Dairy owner Austin Allred explained what they were looking at. Besides the milking barns, feeding pens and other things typical of a dairy farm, guests got to see Royal Dairy's "kitchen," where the animal feed is made, and worm farm.
Royal Dairy is part of the much larger Royal Family Farms operation, Hebdon explained. The family owns another dairy near Moxie, as well as four feedlots, a beef processing facility, a rock quarry, 15,000 acres of potato farms and 15,000 acres of fruit orchards. That means that just about anything that one arm of the operation needs, another can supply.
The overwhelming majority of Royal Dairy's animal feed is grown on other Royal Family farms, Allred said.
"My dad is a potato farmer," he said. "What that means is he grows potatoes once every five or six years. In the meantime, (cattle feed) is what he grows, and he does that for a healthy rotation to keep his soil healthy and sustainable ... Anytime you're growing something that our digestive system can handle, meaning potatoes, onions, carrots, those products really put a lot of pressure on the soil. You cannot plant vegetables for human consumption back-to-back to back-to-back if you want to be farming for the next decade and decades."
Those plants are upcycled into protein as cattle feed, he said, and the manure that the cattle create in return is flushed out of the pens twice a day into a screw press to separate the liquid from the solids. The solid material is sent to be composted, and the liquid goes to the five-acre worm farm.
"After our mechanical separation systems, it gets down to where it's about 60%, 70% cleaner than (untreated waste)," Allred said. "But once we get through the worm farm, we remove about 98% of all the solids and there's almost no smell. (And) once the liquid manure gets through this process, the capacity to create methane is nearly 100% removed."
The wood chips that the worms live in come from Royal Family's orchards, Allred said, putting retired fruit trees to good use. The chips are also used to make biochar, which keeps compost from losing precious nitrogen. Nitrogen is the most expensive thing Royal Family Farms procures from outside its own operations, he said.
"For the last decade, we've been really focused on trying to grow more with less synthetic inputs, with less imports, because that allows us to be more sustainable and hopefully around longer for our kids and for the future," Allred said. "Our biggest expense (on the farm) is fertilizer, and on the dairy our biggest expense is feed. Being able to close that loop and work that all into our system, fertilizer from the cattle, feed for the cattle, and integrating the worms and the compost and the biochar systems help us to slowly work towards reducing our dependency on synthetics."
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