Published 7:54 am Thursday, June 5, 2025
ROYAL CITY, Wash. — Royal Dairy is home to the world’s largest worm farm, but that’s just one part of a much bigger sustainability story.
Royal Family Farming, in Royal City, Wash., and CMI Orchards, based in Wenatchee, Wash., are collaborating to establish the 50-acre Soil Center, a facility for converting organic waste materials into composting and other soil amendments throughout their operations.
A groundbreaking for the Soil Center is slated for the end of June, and the center will be completely built and operating independently by mid-summer.
Royal Family Farming includes dairies in Royal City and Moxee, representing more than 25,000 animals; the Allred family’s potato and feed farms of about 15,000 acres; a beef processing facility, two worm farms and five feedlots.
“It all connects back to the utilization of our nutrients, whether we’re talking about feeding cattle, growing crops or fertilizing crops,” said Austin Allred, owner and president of Royal Dairy and Royal Family Farming. “It all comes back to a good utility of all of our investment and resources. All of it is about keeping our resources and putting them where they’re valuable.”
CMI Orchards is made up of four owner/grower groups raising apples, pears and cherries on about 20,000 acres.
“CMI is blazing a bold trail toward a carbon-negative future in tree fruit, driving real change across the produce industry,” said Rose Vejvoda, sustainability manager for CMI Orchards.
“We’re turning orchard waste into powerful tools for regeneration … It delivers value at every level,” Vejvoda said. “Growers get fertile, more productive soils. Retailers and consumers get top-quality fruit grown with purpose. And together, we’re protecting farmland for the next generation, proving that sustainability isn’t just possible, it’s profitable.”
“Right now there is a big, big squeeze on dairies and orchard fruit growers,” said Michael Hebdon, vice president of regenerative agriculture at Royal Family Farming and general manager of the Soil Center. “Everything we’re doing here is to build up their most valuable resource, which is their soil. Investing in your natural systems in the long term is a slam dunk. Being able to capture that revenue in the short term off of carbon credits is a double slam dunk.”
The soil center produces carbon credits by mitigating emissions or sequestering potential emissions, including greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane or nitrous oxide.
Upgrading to clean electricity whenever possible, removing solids from waste streams and using aerobic composting – requiring oxygen — all keep greenhouse gases from forming, Vejvoda said.
The center processes the same ingredients that could form greenhouse gases into stabilized amendments for soil fertility.
Both forms of improvement generate a carbon credit, managed by Hebdon and two third-party project managers and audited by another third-party entity. Verra, a non-profit organization, approves and registers the carbon credits. A carbon credit is equal to one metric ton of carbon dioxide mitigated.
Weekly measurements are taken of the solids and carbon content in the water, and annual measurements are taken from the soil. Multiple liquid flow meters check measurements across the dairy operations.
Last year, the worm farm reduced 52,788 tons of carbon dioxide into carbon credit sales to the companies that purchase the orchard, dairy and ranch’s fruit, milk or beef.
The dairies combined have the potential to produce more than 700,000 pounds of carbon-neutral milk each day.
The orchards will produce 800 million pounds of fruit and the dairy will produce 255 million pounds of milk each year.
The carbon credits produced through their regenerative efforts will far surpass their emissions, Hebdon said.
Diversifying into the carbon revenue market will allow the Soil Center’s growers and owners to be profitable for generations, Hebdon said. They won’t have to rely on synthetic inputs, and the crops would be robust enough to reduce pesticide use.
The dairy is working with Cornell University and Washington State University to track methane as the cows eat, installing sensors to monitor and reduce emissions.
“From the back end of the cow all through our system to the back end of the worm farm, we reduce about 95% of the solids that are in the waste stream, which, if managed improperly, would have all become methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than CO2,” Hebdon said.
In the “kitchen,” the dairy develops higher-quality feed, produced on fewer acres to get the same amount, or more, milk.
The dairy uses 20 different ingredients in 15 different rations, depending on the age and type of the animal – including forage crops grown on the farms.
“All of these different crops that are actually better for the environment than the farm’s cash crops, which are generally potatoes,” Hebdon said. “Inevitably, when you plant a tuber or a bulb, something that is going to be consumed by a human, it puts way more pressure on the environment and the field than growing a grass for a cow does.”
CMI Orchards have made a zero-burn commitment. When a tree is retired, they are turned into wood chips for composting.
The kitchen also uses unused items from their partners, such as culled apples with worms or high-starch potato slurry, in cattle rations.
“We bring in about 200 tons per day of different byproducts from the local ag economy to be able to upcycle it into milk, meat, manure and the different products we sell, rather than this all going to a dump or landfill,” Hebdon said. “For every ton of produce that rots, you get about one-third of a ton of greenhouse gases into the air. When we process it, we reduce it down to where actually the sequestration far outweighs the emissions.”
The Royal City dairy milks 6,500 head two times a day. The Moxee dairy manages another herd of more than 6,000 head.
Feed alleys are flushed twice a day as the cows are milked, moving all waste into manure management.
Mixed manure moves into a primary separation system. All larger solid particles are removed and sent to the compost yard.
The liquid fraction moves through the sand lane, which removes finer, smaller particles out of the waste stream, then through a filter to the worm farm.
About 200,000 gallons of water are processed daily through the worm farm, Hebdon said.
The liquid manure that’s been completely processed is about 98% cleaner once it’s run through all the processes at the dairy, ending at the worm farm, Hebdon said.
The worm farm in Royal City is about 8 acres of beds. Another worm farm in Moxee is about 6 acres. It came online last year. Together, they represent the largest worm farm in the world. They are designed by BioFiltro, a Davis, Calif.-based company that uses earthworms to clean wastewater.
“As far as we know, we are for sure the world’s largest biofiltration worm farm,” Hebdon said. “There may or may not be other worm farms that are just worm farms that are bigger, I have no clue. But absolutely, we process the most manure solids. There’s no question. You’re the biggest one if you’re the only one.”
The Royal City worm farm was the dairy’s first move into greenhouse gas emissions, Hebdon said. The dairy wanted to clean up its water streams and ensure its liquid manure was the best it could be.
Discussions began in 2014, and led to a small pilot program, about half an acre.
A new worm farm in California is about 8 acres.
“We’re definitely the first, but others are catching on to what we’re doing,” Hebdon said.
The worm farm has 21 cells, each 65 feet by 225 feet. Each cell has 3.25 million worms. Each cell has about a thousand worms per pound.
“We’d be pretty disappointed if we didn’t have 65, 70 million worms out there,” Hebdon said.
The worms are “super-simple creatures, as far as we know,” he said. “They like to have bedding, like some place to be. They like it in a semi-moist state. Keep fresh bedding for them and keep them moistened.”
Wood chips act as bedding and water filtration in the worm farm.
A sprinkler system delivers waste from the dairy. The super-fine particles that remain in the liquid manure get filtered out even further in the wood chips, Vejvoda said.
The worms work their way through that residue and process it into a worm casting. After a year or two of processing the manure, the center harvests what remains of the wood chips and worm castings to be processed into vermicompost.
The center will sell composting and biochar products after processing.
A machine breaks the upper crust of the worm beds about once a week. The underground bedding stays about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, even in winter.
Worms typically live for several years, a maximum of five to six years. These particular species of worm, red wigglers, reach a maximum length of 3 to 4 inches.
Worms are hermaphroditic, so when they mate, both worms can get pregnant and lay a cocoon a week, with three to eight worms inside.
“Two worms at the end of the year can become hundreds of worms,” Hebdon said. “We brought in our first seed batch of worms in 2015, and we’ve never had to buy more worms. They reproduce like crazy. We don’t have to do much to keep populations up. We just need to keep them happy and fed.”
Hebdon estimates the cost is about 1 cent a year per worm. That covers the power to run pumps, separation systems and three full-time employees, he said.
The Soil Center could easily span hundreds of thousands of acres, across Washington and the western United States, and beyond. Partners are eager for the companies to go into Europe and Africa, Hebdon said.
“Right now, we are the pioneers in this entire industry,” Hebdon said. The companies were motivated from the beginning to figure it out, he said.
“We kind of stubbed our toe and built it out along the way; we didn’t realize this would become what it is,” he said.
“It’s also super, super expensive,” he cautioned. The Soil Center buildout cost up to $12 million, as did the two worm farms.
The carbon credits help the systems pay off in the short-term, producing a beneficial cash flow, he said.
“It has been a big upfront investment,” Hebdon said. “But we’ve almost always found that when you invest in natural systems, long-term there’s always going to be a payoff.”
