About Us

Blueblood Animal Fodders

Blueblood Composts 

Royal Oak Farm, LLC is a small business owned primarily by the Newman family.  They employ two workforces at their 115 acre property in Evington, Virginia - a full-time staff of 13 who manage everything from trucking to compost production to animal feed distribution; and an invisible workforce no one ever sees.  This second workforce labors quietly, behind the scenes, without complaint over office issues and never disputes its rate of pay.  These Royal Oak staff consist of microbes, billions of them, that do most of the hard work of creating compost from wastes generated by Virginia industries, businesses and municipalities.

Between these two workforces, Royal Oak has mastered the process of manufacturing composts, and compost-based specialty soils at the farm on Orrix Creek Road, in addition to providing animal feeds for farmers in the central and southern Virginia regions.  Royal Oak Farm compost products, marketed under the Blueblood™ product line, are available to commercial contractors, landscaping firms and farmers, as well as homeowners who wish to beautify their yards and flowerbeds. Royal Oak makes Blueblood™ compost from paper mill residuals, food processing plant discards, animal manures, sawdust, wood ash, trimmings from local tree services, agricultural byproducts such as straw, plus old or poor quality hay and silage.  No human biosolids or mixed trash is used to make Blueblood™ composts.

Ken Newman, a native of Great Britain, holds a degree in horticulture.  After he arrived in the United States in 1985, Newman toiled as a truck driver, and managed garden centers and a landscaping service before pooling resources with his wife, Barbara and her mother, Doris Mueller, to purchase the southeastern Bedford County farm in 1995.  Newman wasn't a stranger to farming when the family established their operation, having grown up on a dairy farm owned by Oxford University.  He's also well accustomed to recycling, which came into vogue in his homeland centuries ago out of necessity because of diminishing resources.

The passage of years, circumstances, and variables beyond the Newman's control, such as weather and voracious canines, transformed the initial focus of Royal Oak Farm.  At first, they raised dairy replacement heifers.  That didn't work out.  Not to be undone, the Newmans then envisioned a thriving operation of pasture raised hogs and free range chickens.  Marauding dog packs, and the propensity of swine to uproot every piece of vegetation in their paths, soon tempered the family's early dream.

Frustration, however, gave birth to innovation.  Newman changed his hog business from farrow to finish on pasture to a finishing operation in hoop barns.  His hogs, healthy, active and unfettered, ambled comfortably about the very spacious barns.  He developed a small composting operation to handle the manure, the waste bedding, and some of the food discards he’d been feeding to the hogs.  Over time, though, Newman became concerned about the increasing regulations governing hog raising. “Due to concerns over food safety, the buyers of farm-raised hogs want a complete tracking dossier on each hog, documenting everything that’s been done to raise that animal,” he said. These concerns, coupled with several years of drought-induced poor hay crop growth in central Virginia, led Newman to rethink his strategy in 2005.  He found that many of the regional animal agriculture farmers were looking for a reliable source of high-quality animal feeds, which Royal Oak provides by recycling discards from food processing, and that several businesses, most notably a paper manufacturer in Bedford County, were interested in the Royal Oak composting operation.  So Royal Oak reorganized its business into two operating divisions – animal fodders distribution and commercial-scale composting.

Blueblood™ Animal Fodders

Recycling products from food manufacturers into animal fodders (feed) is a win-win situation for the corporations, as well as for Royal Oak.  The first company they contacted was a potato-chip maker in Lynchburg, Va., which was quite interested in a means to get rid of waste left over from the manufacture of potato chips. "They produce 20 tons of waste a day," Newman said.  "We got more food waste (potato skins, corn, not finished chips) than anticipated, so we began supplying dairy and beef farmers with the surplus.”  In addition, Royal Oak Farm has contracts with a bakery in Lynchburg, and a fried foods maker in Bedford.
Employees were hired specifically for the task of debagging bread trucked to Royal Oak Farm from the bakery.  Once the bread wrappers are removed, the product, which contains 13 to 14 percent protein, is stored for use in covered bins along with corn gluten pellets, corn screenings, soybean hulls, a 13 percent protein cattle blend, "gin trash" (a byproduct of the cotton manufacturing process), fryer waste and wheat middlings.  In 2007, Royal Oak set up a railcar receiving station nearby, allowing large volumes of 16% protein corn gluten feed to be shipped in rail.  For more information about Blueblood™ Animal Fodders, please visit our Animal Fodders page.

Blueblood™ Composts

Royal Oak is one of the premier composting operations in the eastern U.S.  Composting is the controlled aerobic decomposition of biodegradable materials.  Thermophilic temperatures higher than 135 degrees destroy pathogens and weed seeds.  The end product of this integrated system is a stable, mature, highly aerobic compost that is extremely beneficial in farming, gardening and landscaping.  Careful selection of compost feedstock materials results in a high quality finished product.  All the ingredients, according to Newman, are organic, and contain no human waste.

Composting is done on a 10-acre paved asphalt pad, using top-line processing equipment.  The manufacturing process is carefully controlled and the compost is used by contractors, businesses and homeowners throughout central and western Virginia.  The compost is also used as an ingredient in several customized soil blends Royal Oak sells.  For more information about our compost products, please visit our Blueblood™ Landscape Products page.

There's always something going on at Royal Oak Farm.  Royal Oak Farm is a unique operation, but it points the way to the future.  The progressive philosophy of Royal Oak can be expressed in three words "Reclamation, Conservation, Innovation".