When eight-year-old Jessica Cleminson tearfully confided to her diary the devastation she felt at learning that her pregnant pet cow Caroline was to be killed, little did she know that her child's-eye view of the crisis would touch the nation in such a powerful way.

The simple message, printed earlier this week in The Northern Echo and followed up by newspapers nationwide, cut through the facts and figures of foot-and-mouth and brought home the emotional devastation that the epidemic is bringing to farming families.

It even drew the attention of the Prime Minister. Yesterday her father, farmer Stephen Cleminson, visited The Northern Echo offices in Darlington, where he met the Prime Minister face to face and appealed to him directly to take a long, hard look at the industry.

THE time had come. The Maff vet on the Cleminson's farm picked up the phone to London. It was the worst possible news, and it knocked the bottom out of Stephen Cleminson's world. The pigs had foot-and-mouth.

The stunned County Durham farmer walked outside to breathe some fresh air, to stop his head spinning. And already, they were there at the gate. A fleet of army vans and police cars were heading up to New Hummerbeck Farm, eager to begin the urgent slaughter, the cull of a lifetime's work that the family had dreaded.

Just that morning Mr Cleminson had been feeding the cattle with his young daughter Jessica at the West Auckland farm. The eight-year-old had been chatting to her father and the cattle, calling them by their names, expertly putting the right amount of powdered milk in the calves' buckets and food in the hayricks.

"Jessica, in particular, would always help out," says Mr Cleminson. "She was round with me until about 11am. She knows what to do, how much food to give them, chatting all the time, just like any other little girl who wants to be helping her daddy."

And like any little girl growing up on a farm, Jessica regularly came into contact with life and death. Young lambs sometimes died after a few weeks and sick cattle sometimes had to be put down. These incidents were always carefully explained to her by her parents and she accepted it, but there was no reasoned explanation her father could give his eight-year-old daughter when he realised all the animals would have to be killed.

To add to the misery, the cull took place in spring. "All farmers are aware they're growing animals and that, eventually, they will be killed," says Mr Cleminson. "You know that. That's our job - to produce things for somebody else to kill and someone else to eat. But you try to produce them in a nice way and often they have a better quality of life than you. When it's snowing and raining, they wait for you in a nice warm shed while you battle through the snow to get to them.

"Usually, you look after calves for 12 to 18 months before they're taken out. On Sunday there were some cows that calved last week and now the calves are dead."

Jessica's pregnant pet cow Caroline was killed quickly, before she calved; the family couldn't bear to think that the calf could be brought into the world just to be subject to immediate slaughter.

The children grew up with the docile cow, who roamed the farm even before Jessica and her 13-year-old sister Laura were born. She would let the children and their friends ride on her back and would stand with her head in Jessica's arms while the little girl stroked her.

"I didn't want Caroline to calve that night and me to assist with the calving and have all that trauma and then have to kill a day-old animal," says Mr Cleminson. "How would that upset Jessica, knowing a baby calf had to die?"

But Jessica's happy world had already been turned upside-down. While officials held the attention of her distraught parents, Jessica crawled under her bed to tearfully confide to her diary her sadness at Caroline's death sentence. Moments later, Maff arranged for the girls to be sent to their grandmother so they would not have to witness the slaughter.

It wasn't until she had left that her parents discovered the heartbreaking account and were moved to tears.

Mr Cleminson's has also had to cope this week with the loss of a family industry; his roots in farming go deep, with Cleminsons farming since the 1600s. It is his life.

Every day of the week, for the last 22 years, Mr Cleminson has gone out to look after his cattle in a little-varying routine. Although technology and machinery have changed the face of agriculture, he has been working towards the same goals that his father, grandfather and generations of his family worked towards for the last 400 years. One of those goals has been to ensure the welfare of their animals. And while it has its benefits, farming is a tough life, and it's got a lot tougher. "When I was little in the 1960s, my father had four men work for him. "By the 1970s he had one. Now there's just me. It's very isolated," says Mr Cleminson.

They made a living though, until the family's livelihood came crashing to a halt on Sunday.

Yesterday the County Durham farmer had a chance few of us will ever have, half an hour of the Prime Minister's undivided attention, during which he appealed to him to take a long, hard look at the farming industry. Mr Cleminson wants farming to change fundamentally. He gets £30,000 subsidies a year, he told Mr Blair, but still loses £20,000. Farmers needed help with diversification, he told the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister agreed.

Finally, he handed over Jessica's diary. The Prime Minister already knew all about it. He told her father people were "very touched by Jessica's letter", and then flicked through the diary and asked how she was.

Since The Northern Echo printed it this week, the story of his daughter Jessica's diary has been published across the nation and Jessica has been inundated with letters from well-wishers.

Mr Cleminson - and his daughter - would swap all the attention, from Prime Ministers and the public, to have their animals back, and some normality in what has become an unfamiliar and frightening world.

Read more about the foot-and-mouth crisis here.