What if drought forces mass fallowing of California's Central Valley?
Central Valley fallowing spikes almonds, pistachios and specialty produce — not CBOT wheat/corn, and the 'fabs are water-intensive' semis leg is noise for an ag shock. Rhymes with 2014-2016 and 2021-2022 droughts, when ~500k+ acres fallowed and tree-nut prices ran while headline grains barely moved. Forward angle: SGMA pumping limits make this structural, not cyclical — persistent specialty-crop inflation, but a non-event for the Nasdaq complex the cascade pulls in.
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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 mixed shock. A multi-year drought and pumping limits force mass fallowing of the Central Valley, spiking US produce and nut prices. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Food inflation ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.