Latest news with #RoyalFamilyFarms
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
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."
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Soup, salad, monstera? Have your next lunch date inside this breezy Pierce County nursery
Nurseries can be a sort of refuge, a quiet place where you can get lost in part-sun and part-shade, where the woes of the world can soak into the dirt instead of settling in your soul. What if they also served lunch? While other restaurants dot their shelves and windows with dangling philodendrons and towering ficus, Terrace Café lives among plants in a more literal sense. It's located inside the inside the 32,500-square-foot Watson's Greenhouse on Pioneer Way East, in what is technically Puyallup. I had been to Watson's a few times in search of yet another houseplant I definitely didn't need or a particular varietal of lavender to add to the butterfly garden — or maybe it was solace and a snack. So it was that I found myself at Watson's one day last spring, although I'm pretty sure I also left with a plant. The server/host kindly asked if I had a reservation. It was a weekday, about 10:30 a.m., and I thought it odd that I would have bothered. First, I was alone, and second, how busy could it be? Then I noticed the white placards on most of the tables that read, 'RESERVED.' By the time I was crunching away on a super-parmed Caesar salad, wanting even more of the delightful housemade croutons, the place was abuzz. Huh. So this is where ladies lunch. What was for years nothing more than a modest coffee bar has been transformed into a full-service restaurant with a professional kitchen that offers seasonal salads and flatbreads, sandwiches and soup, hearty plates of short ribs and roast chicken. Since its debut one year ago, the menu has changed a few times, largely with the seasons. Executive chef Jordan Fisher will shake things up again come March. The cavatappi, for instance, has transitioned from a decadent Dungeness crab mac to the current version, the curly-cue pasta tossed in the pan with a creamy tomato sauce and Italian meatballs made with beef from Royal Family Farms in Central Washington. The summer presented halibut with pesto butter and Copper River salmon with asparagus risotto. Handhelds have ranged from sliced steak with garlic aioli to chipotle chicken with smoked gouda, and since last August have included breakfast sandwiches, like the classic with Tillamook smoked cheddar and red-pepper jelly or one with bacon, a folded egg and sundried tomato schmear. This fall and winter, the rotating sourdough grilled cheese blends brie and gruyere with a jammy note of cranberry and sliced pear. Espresso drinks with Monroe's Vinaccio Coffee also vary, such as winter's vanilla-eggnog that evokes crème brûlée. They pair perfectly with the homemade pastries — a compelling reason to take the Pioneer Way route between Tacoma and Puyallup in 2025. Pastry chef Vanessa Poisson previously baked at Zylberschtein's, the Jewish-style deli and bakery in Seattle's Pinehurst neighborhood. Her case at Terrace holds bagels, cookies, sourdough cinnamon buns, wonderfully knobby scones, muffins, quickbreads and croissants. Homemade ice cream and luscious cheesecake are among the plated sweet treats. The only thing missing is house bread, which is sourced instead from Macrina Bakery. Watson's has had a cafe since the late 1990s when the family built the big, Belgian greenhouse that now holds seemingly endless houseplants and homewares. They leased it to several tenants over the years, most of whom ran it as a coffee shop with pastries and light bites. They had 'been kind of marinating' on the idea of taking it under their wing and kicking it up a notch, explained CEO Maidee Watson. 'We knew how to run a garden center,' she added. 'We didn't know how to run a restaurant, but we knew what we wanted.' The Watsons have been in the plant business since 1974 when Maidee and her mother, Fran, developed a little U-pick patch. They grew all sorts of produce but customer sales — from a garage — hinged on cucumbers and beans, recalled Watson recently. Her late father, Don, had always 'wanted land he could grow things on,' she said. He continued teaching high-school biology for another decade before joining his daughter and wife at the family business full-time. Larry's Market, a regional grocery chain that fell into bankruptcy in the early 2000s, asked them to grow bedding plants. So they built a greenhouse and on Valentine's Day 1984 hung a cowbell near the makeshift entrance. 'We didn't know if anyone would come out this way, but people started showing up,' said Maidee. 'They did, even the first day … Now all three of my sons work here.' Today the nursery is at least four times its original size, growing 'almost all our own annuals,' she added. In 2021 they opened a small second shop in Federal Way and last November took over Bark and Garden Center in Olympia. In Puyallup, the then-cafe tenant kept it closed during the pandemic. Amid many pivots — Watson's had never sold a thing online until 2020 — the family decided it was time. In 2023, Maidee's son Addison, a graphic designer by study, fleshed out the concept and aesthetic. They completely overhauled the layout and greatly expanded its footprint with the help of their in-house construction team. (Garden centers, it turns out, always have a need for custom builds.) I wish they would bring back the beautiful, flaky, fluffy quiche, whose Instagram image first compelled me to visit. On a subsequent late-lunch date — a friend and I made a 1 p.m. reservation — the day's allotment had already been consumed. I get it; the egg game got weird last year, and people can get angry when menu items are M.I.A. There's plenty more to dig. The family's ambition is to nurture a café as reliable as their core businesss, and Terrace is 'the food representation of Watson's,' said Fisher. It all feels inextricably intertwined with the rest of the greenhouse. They went with a streamlined, timeless black-and-white theme, a smart move. Let the plants do the talking — most restaurants would kill for this kind of natural light. ▪ 6211 Pioneer Way E, Puyallup, 253-251-25274, ▪ Details: full-service coffee shop and cafe with breakfast, lunch, house pastries, wine and beer; catering and private event rentals available ▪ Reservations: recommended on weekends and peak lunch hours, but walk-ins welcome
