What if driverless tractors take over the Corn Belt?
John Deere shipping driverless tractor fleets at Corn-Belt scale is an ag-automation productivity story — long Deere and edge-AI/robotics, collapsing seasonal H-2A labor demand; structurally disinflationary for farm costs. Rhymes with the May-2023 Nvidia capex-wave. Forward: the cleanest expression is DE itself (autonomy as a high-margin subscription layer), not the diffuse NVDA beta the cascade defaults to; connectivity in rural fields remains the gating constraint.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-on shock. John Deere ships fully driverless tractor fleets across the Corn Belt, collapsing seasonal farm-labor demand and H-2A visa volumes. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Job displacement ▲ · Robotics productivity ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.