We often talk about changing farming as though the main question is what farmers should do differently. But a farm sits inside a much bigger system.

In this week’s episode, Shaken Not Burned co-host Felicia talks to Richard Zaltzman, chief executive of Europe's food innovation community EIT Food, about the impact of that system. It starts with the idea of a landscape: not just a collection of farms, but the buyers, processors, financiers, insurers and other businesses that shape what farmers can actually do.

They discuss the problem of matching future supply with demand, sharing risk, creating markets for crops that are useful in a rotation but hard to sell, and why local processing and other forms of market infrastructure matter. Richard also argues that some of the investment needed for agricultural transition may sit outside the farm gate, in the infrastructure connecting production to markets.

And if every place is different, what does it actually mean to scale change?

This is the second episode in our agriculture arc. Last week, we spoke to Philipp Lukas at Future Biogas about the economics of farming. Next week, we talk to Ivo Degn at Re:Source to take that question one stage further: if changing individual farms doesn’t add up to changing the food system, where does transformation actually have to happen?

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Food security is back on the agenda. In recent years, disrupted supply chains, war, extreme weather and volatile energy and fertiliser prices have all shown how quickly problems elsewhere can affect what food is available, where it comes from and what it costs.

At the same time, there are growing concerns about the condition of the system producing that food: climate risk, declining soil health, water stress, emissions and biodiversity loss. Unfortunately, that’s where the conversation often narrows: we identify problems with the food system and then very quickly arrive at a list of things that farmers should do differently.

It’s almost as though the main challenge is persuading farmers to do something different. But wanting to change and being able to change are not the same thing. Farmers need to cut emissions, improve soils, use fewer inputs, protect biodiversity and become more resilient to a changing climate. Depending on who you ask, they may also need to grow different crops, adopt new technologies or change the way they manage their land.

How much can a farmer actually change if everything around the farm – markets, infrastructure, finance, supply chains and policy – continues to reward the existing system?

In this week’s episode, the first one in our arc focused on agriculture, Felicia talks to Philipp Lukas, founder and chief executive of Future Biogas, which currently operates 11 large biogas plants across eastern England. It recently opened what it describes as the UK's first unsubsidised biomethane plant, where its agreement with AstraZeneca gives that gas a commercial buyer, while the crops feeding the plant are grown as part of local farm rotations and the nutrients are returned to the land.

The company sits in an unusual place between farming and energy. Its anaerobic digestion plants take crops grown as part of farm rotations and turn them into biomethane for the gas grid, while returning nutrients to the land. What makes Future Biogas interesting is not simply the technology, but the connections it creates between things we usually treat separately.

Biomethane isn't an answer to all of farming's problems. But it is an example of what can happen when something that is good for the soil also has a customer, when waste becomes an input, and when a farm can earn money from its connection to another part of the economy. That matters because many of the things we now want from farming – healthier soils, lower emissions and greater resilience – involve cost or risk somewhere along the way.

The discussion covers how anaerobic digestion can give farmers a new market for crops grown in rotation, return nutrients to the land and produce biomethane for the gas grid — and what this tells us about a bigger question: if we want farmers to make different choices, do we also need to change the economics around those choices?

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Insurance is supposed to protect us from risk. But what happens when the risks themselves are changing?

Risk doesn't disappear because we fail to recognise or price it. Decisions that make sense individually — pumping more groundwater during a drought, building another housing development, keeping water prices low — can accumulate until environmental change becomes economic loss.

Insurance is one of the places where that loss becomes visible. Insurers pay some of the bill; the rest falls on households, businesses and governments. As risks increase, premiums can rise, terms can tighten and some things can become difficult to insure at all. But the outcome isn't fixed: insurers look not only at the physical event, but at what's exposed to it and how vulnerable it is. We may not be able to stop a flood or an earthquake, but building standards, flood protection, healthier ecosystems and other forms of resilience can change how much damage they cause.

That matters because insurance can be more than a way of paying for damage afterwards. It can signal where risk is building, encourage measures that reduce vulnerability and, through insurers' role as investors, help finance some of the resilience that makes future economic activity possible.

In the final episode of our insurance arc, Felicia and Giulia bring together conversations we had in the previous three episodes with Robert Johnston of Clark University, Regula Hess of WWF, and Rachel Delhaise of Convex to explore what insurance can tell us about the changing relationship between environmental and economic risk.

From water and the insurance protection gap to rising premiums, resilience and the limits of insurability, they ask a deceptively simple question: do we invest in reducing risk now, or pay for the damage later?

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