At one time, the sight of a cabinet minister addressing farmers in a room beside a busy auction mart might have attracted just a little publicity – for the exotic setting, if for nothing else. However, such is the status of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), sidelined on the fringes of government, that few outside the narrow farming world took much interest when its secretary of state spoke at a major farming event.

It was late in 2014 at Hexham, a pleasant Northumberland market town astride a River Tyne rich in salmon. Enter Liz Truss, the third secretary of state for Defra in the five years of the Conservative-led Coalition government (2010–15). While seen as a stopgap when a pedestrian Owen Patterson, a climate-change-cum-EU sceptic on the right of the party, was sacked in July 2014, she continued in her role after the 2015 general election.

Speaking at the Northern Farming Conference, Truss briefly addressed the nub of a dilemma at the heart of farming: namely, attracting younger people into an industry with many elderly farmers. It is a challenge faced by predecessors at Defra, one of whom commissioned a report from a farming specialist, Devon landowner and rural surveyor David Fursdon, early in the life of the 2010–15 government in an attempt to introduce fresh blood into agriculture. By 2013, Fursdon’s ‘Future of farming review’ called for early retirement measures to benefit older farmers, alongside initiatives to encourage new entrants into the industry. It is a major challenge. The report gained little traction. Fursdon, a pragmatic consultant respected across sectors, is, unsurprisingly, frustrated and a little puzzled.

In nearby Somerset, Andrew Fewings knows all about the challenges facing younger people trying to get on to the first rung of an elusive farming ladder. The demand from the young is there all right, he insists; but the supply, in the form of available land – increasingly a speculative plaything for some of the rich – is woefully short. Fewings farms 336 acres, as a tenant of the Crown Estate – a semi-state institution, dating back to 1066, ostensibly owned by the Queen – on the flatlands near Dunster.