Cattle-breeders in Russia's Urals will feed cows with confiscated marijuana over the cold winter months, Novye Izvestia daily reported. Drug workers said they adopted the unusual form of animal husbandry after they were forced to destroy the sunflowers and maize crops that the 40 tonnes of marijuana had been planted among.

"There is simply no other way out. You see, the fields are planted with feed crops and if we remove it all the cows will have nothing to eat," a Federal Drugs Control Service spokeswoman for the Urals region of Sverdlovsk told the paper. But he stressed that he does not know what the milk will be like after such
unusual fodder.

Cows in Russia are traditionally fed with clover and sunflower.

Drug use in Russia took off with the decline of the Soviet Union and police have been fighting drugsmugglers  often shipping heroin from Afghanistan - for years.