I haven't talked much about the green waste collection program. I've been doing it now for a couple of years. All the supermarket chains either run something that reduces green landfill, or are talking about it.

It's not cheap. I have to supply the green wheelie bins, and I need expensive public liability insurance to be allowed to participate.

I have to show up at an agreed time, most of the year, three times a week. At holiday peaks I have to collect every day. The bins are heavy, often overfilled, and I have to drop them off the loading bay into my trailer, then man-handle them when I get home. Its hard work, and one day I won't be strong enough to do it.

When I started there was another guy doing the same local supermarket. He was pretty annoying, he would take the bins I supplied, was caught moving material from my bins to his. Some days I would go and collect and come away with one half full bin. I was going to chuck it in as not worth the effort, but he…ahem…died. So now I'm it, I take it all. On an average week I take somewhere between 2-3 cubic metres of green waste, so in a year I am processing 100-150 cubic metres! Astonishing.

It's also astonishing what's in them. Sometimes its seasonal….for example, this week there were dozens of passionfruit. Sometimes its surplus….they order 10 palettes of pumpkins and can't sell them. Over time the pumpkins start to decay, the palettes take up too much room, and suddenly I have a wheelie bin full of pumpkins.

Sometimes its packaging-related. Capsicums, for example, sold in plastic tubes with one of each colour. Because its packaged it has a use-by date, and once that clocks over out they go! Even though they are perfect. Bags of oranges, trays of berries, bags of grapes...all wasted because of the use-by stamp.

And of course a lot of the waste items are faulty…apples with soft rot spots, pears so ripe you can't pick them up, citrus with green mould.

At this end there's a couple of options. If I have time I go through the bins and sort them for different livestock. Poultry love lettuce and stone-fruit, however rotten. Cattle and sheep love cabbage leaves and other brassica….broccoli, cauliflower. But the cows also love watermelon, bananas, apples, pears not so much, and a small amount of oranges. I get a huge amount of outer leaves of lettuce, all the time. The cattle won't touch that, but are happy enough to eat whole lettuce heads. Strange how their tastes go.

With the sheep I just tow a wheelie bin out to a new spot and empty it out. The sheep come running when they hear the bin rattling. Unsorted, there's all sort of stuff in there, not all of it good for sheep. They seems to eat 80% of it when it first goes out, then come back over the next day and finish it off. Except for lemons and onions, and usually spinache. There can be a lot of plastic in the bin depending on who is doing the waste sorting. Someone, bizarrely, regularly empties the pre-made salads into the bin, then chucks in the salad dressing bag, the plastic bowl and plastic fork. I had a young ram grab and scoff down the plastic skin that wraps a continental cucumber, and he died a day later, so I try and get as much of it out as I can.

At the same time, I can't just plunge my hand into the mess and pull stuff out. More than once there has been a sharp knife in the mix, scraped off the bench as someone cleans up lettuces, or segments pumpkins.

Because of the plastic hazard I don't give an emptied bin to the cows. I go through the bin and pick out, say, 60 apples and feed them that. The green feed for cattle is a treat and a bonus. Our cows are well fed on olive leaves, grass and hay. But we carry extra sheep based on the green feed, so I rely on it to keep them well fed. In the dead parts of winter and summer when grass is scarce, the green bins are a great supplement.

And, on top of that, I have a set of large compost piles that regularly get a wheelie bin of green waste dumped in top. Out in our main paddock is The Scar….a long, wide trench that was mined for a road. The wheelie bins have been going into that and slowly filling it up. It's now a rich source of lush black soil that I use for planting trees, potting mixes etc. It was all a bit of an eyesore when we moved in. It still is, but in a different way. It's pretty much centre of the farm, on view from any angle, and I need to keep it fenced off the keep the sheep out. I just cobble together a rag-tag fence made out of star-pickets and palettes. But one day it won't be so ugly…..!

But how's this for a weird anomaly….? If I want to sell a sheep or a cow, I have to stop feeding them any green waste for 28 days beforehand. That's so there's no risk of them holding any pesticides, from say, eating a box of broccoli. But if you had bought the same broccoli the day before it was chucked out, you are allowed to eat it. No one checks if you have pesticides accumulated in your meat.

It's lucky no one is going to be eating you, isn't it?