WE LIVE on a farm and one of our children, a four-year-old girl, is our little farmer.

She knows every breed of cow there is to know and she has hundreds of plastic cows on her own toy farm, which she spends hours with. She works with them, moves them, does work in her cattle yard and she crops her own little paddock.

As we are beef farmers, we often attend cattle sales and of course we can't go without our daughter.

She tells daddy which cows look the best and which ones she would like.

However, at one particular cattle sale, she was not allowed to go in for occupational health and safety reasons.

What in the name is this world coming to when you can't even take your own children to a cattle sale?

I wasn't even allowed to take her in and carry her.

Now not only was this little girl devastated that she couldn't partake in the cattle sale - I was livid.

I took her out of her preschool for the day especially to come along, because she loves it so much and she would have learnt a great deal more from being at the cattle sale than at preschool.

Would these people rather that young farming families don't encourage their children to get into the outdoors and give them the experiences that other children (who live in cities) don't get?

Here they all are telling us that children are obese, they don't get enough exercise or outdoor activity and they then say "well actually you can't take your children along anyway"?

It's a cattle sale for heaven's sake!

So apparently it is going to be law that children cannot go along to these such things.

I for one would like to know why not.

Or would they rather our country kids stay at home to play Playstation and Nintendo and communicate on Twitter? I think not.

Mel McGrath, address withheld