Photo: RNZ/Carol Stiles
The herd 28-year-old Richard Waugh manages often has its diet supplemented by apples and pineapples.
Each week Richard buys in 50 tonnes of waste fruit and vegetables from Eco Stock in Auckland.
The vegetables are collected from market gardens or from restaurants and boarding school kitchens.
"You get a lot of potato peels and things like that that would usually go to a landfill but can come down to us and we can re-use it.
"It's cheaper for the people who supply the veggies to send it to Eco Stock than to put it into the landfill."
When Country Life visited, tired-looking cabbages and potatoes made up most of the vegetable pile but carrots and summer fruit are often in the mix.
Photo: RNZ/Carol Stiles
Richard says it's a low cost, high energy food and, with its high water content, is a hit with cows, especially in summer.
"They love the veggies. They'll choose that over the maize and the silage and the palm kernel."
He says top-quality produce used to be delivered but that has changed over time.
"Some of those (earlier) loads you would quite happily give an apple a wash and eat it but now, especially with Covid, and people struggling for food, there seems to be more going to food banks ... there seems to be a lot less being wasted and a lot less good fruit and veggies coming down to us."
When Richard's 330 cows' fruit and vegetable fix is replaced with maize, milk production drops by about 1000 litres a day.
