Kitchen Waste for Cattle — What Is Safe, What Is Not

Almost every household with a cow puts the kitchen's leftovers in the trough, and most of it is harmless. Some of it is not, and the harm is quiet: a slow drop in milk, an animal that goes off feed, or in a few cases a poisoning that nobody connects to the bucket.

Fine in small amounts

• Rice water (kanji) and cooked rice: energy, well liked. Keep it to a few litres; it is low in protein and high in starch.
• Vegetable peels and trimmings — pumpkin, carrot, radish, turnip, cabbage leaves, spinach stalks: good green supplement. Chop them; whole pieces choke.
• Leftover roti and bread: a few pieces are fine. A whole bucket of stale bread is a grain overload and a bloat risk.
• Tea leaves: a little is harmless.
• Fruit peels and over-ripe fruit: chopped, in moderation.

Keep out of the trough

• Onion and garlic in quantity: damage red blood cells in cattle and goats; a few scraps are tolerated, a bucket is not.
• Potato peels in bulk, and any green or sprouted potato: contain solanine, which causes digestive upset and worse.
• Mouldy bread, rice or vegetables: mould toxins hurt the liver and the rumen. If you would not eat it for the mould, do not feed it.
• Cooked meat, bones and fish: cattle are not scavengers, and animal remains in cattle feed are a serious disease risk.
• Very salty, spicy or oily leftovers: upset the rumen and reduce water balance.
• Chocolate, coffee grounds, avocado, tomato and potato plants: toxic to livestock.
• Plastic, string, bags and wrappers mixed in: the cause of more slow deaths than any poison. Sort the bucket.

The real point

Kitchen waste is a few hundred grams of odds and ends; it cannot feed a milking animal. A cow produces milk from a measured ration — dry fodder, green when there is any, and a compound feed matched to her litres, such as GOKA Star or GOKA Smile — with mineral mixture daily. Treat the kitchen bucket as a treat on top, sorted and chopped, and it does no harm. Treat it as feed and the milk will tell you otherwise.