DEFRA Secretary Therese Coffey has appeared before the EFRA select committee of MPs for the first time since her appointment. For two hours she faced queries on a wide range of issues from food security to using farmland for solar panels. She gave a clear indication that the Local Nature Recovery scheme could be subsumed into an enhanced version of the current Countryside Stewardship Scheme and said the £2.4 billion promised in the 2019 manifesto would still be available to farmers.

COP15 - the International convention on biodiversity begins in Montreal in Canada. It set targets to turn around biodiversity loss by 2030, but says that is unlikely to be met. One of the conundrums facing biodiversity improvement is the pressure to grow more food and there is concern that UK food production is dipping. With the emphasis on food security, are environmental considerations being pushed to the back burner at the moment by farmers? The Green Alliance says the answer to food security has to got to have bio-diversity at its heart.

All week we're talking about abattoirs. Its a crucial part of the meat food chain and yet abattoirs and meat processing plants are facing chronic staff shortages. Last year a lack of butchery workers caused by Covid and Brexit, led to a huge build up of pigs on farms, because they couldn't be processed. That situation has eased, but some companies have spent millions of pounds recruiting staff from countries as far afield as the Phillipines. Abattoirs and processors say they try very hard to recruit locally, but cannot get the staff. Why do British workers shy away from taking up jobs in abattoirs? Martin Anderson a researcher in recruitment at the meat sector at Harper Adams University, has some of the answers.