WHILE your columnist Karen Eberhardt-Sheldon is entitled to put forward her own views and these may not be your own, I feel I must challenge her article ‘Cattle have inherited the Earth’ (SNJ 5/8 2015) on behalf of the constituents in Hardwicke and Severn division of the county council, whom I represent on Gloucestershire County Council who are farmers or concerned with the main Gloucestershire activity of agriculture.

Dairy and beef farmers are going through a difficult time at the moment with the supermarkets undercutting milk prices and bovine TB and the last thing they need is to be told that "cows devour diversity" and "the livestock sector is a major stressor (sic) on many ecosystems".

You would think that she was one of the poor children brought up in the inner city who are being raised in ignorance that milk comes from cows and wool comes from sheep, rather than in California.

This is Gloucestershire for heaven’s sake – home of Double Gloucester cheese and the Gloucester Old Spot pig!

Many of your readers are working hard on the land in a vitally important job of feeding the 60 million living in the UK and providing food security.

Gloucestershire’s own cows and pigs and the farms they live on are well looked after and the quality of our landscape is mainly due to landowners tending it over many generations.

Ms Eberhardt-Shelton’s wilderness will not feed an ever increasing population and Gloucestershire’s farmers deserve your support, not to be told they "have lost all contact with nature’s way".

They ARE nature’s way – a blessed co-operation between man, animals and our green environment in which we who live here are privileged to live.

Cllr Anthony Blackburn (Con, Hardwicke and Severn)

Randwick