Sir, – One weekend recently, I went to Denmark. Catching a flight in Edinburgh I tried to buy The SF for a Danish farmer friend of mine.

En-route to my boarding gate there were three large WH Smith shops. Although each one has what looks like half an acre of papers and magazines, The Scottish Farmer was not on their shelves.

There were plenty magazines on every other imaginable subject, as well as food preparation but not on food production. Now I accept that most of the millions of people who pass through Edinburgh airport do not have food production as a high priority.

But, as your editorial of November 11 argued, there’s ‘a distinct impression that farming does not figure very highly any more in the eyes of the mainstream public’.

Farming and food production should be high, if not top, of the collective awareness of our people, because without food, we die. Casual attention to our food source leaves our agricultural industry open to all sorts of predators.

Everything from lynx, our home-bred wolves worrying and killing sheep (ie dogs), real wolves, Brexit, and a host of other things are attacks on food production.

Consumers of farming produce need farming, just as farmers need consumers. It would not go amiss if farming climbed up the consciousness ladder in peoples’ minds.

Jim McGugan

Letham,

Forfar.