What if Ogallala aquifer depletion shrinks US High-Plains irrigation?
Accelerating Ogallala drawdown forces dryland conversion across the High Plains, structurally cutting US corn and wheat output and lifting the price floor.
how we built this number — every step
The class rate is measured from our dated, sourced event library (decade-normalized Poisson — the full table is public at base_rates.json). The variant’s share within its class is the analyst’s editorial call, published so you can audit it. A wider range means thinner precedent. Full recipe: methodology · scored at Reality Check.
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 (gold) over time vs the crowd's (Polymarket, blue), from the past toward the 3–10 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. The gold path is an illustrative reconstruction anchored to today's estimate — real dated events, not a live re-estimate history.
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Accelerating Ogallala drawdown forces dryland conversion across the High Plains, structurally cutting US corn and wheat output and lifting the price floor. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Corn ▲ · Wheat ▲ · Biodiversity loss ▲ · Climate/crop supply ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.
If it happens — the markets it would move
Biggest moves first. Projected moves are cascade-model priors; hist A–B% = what comparable past events actually did (measured abnormal returns), and model prior · unmeasured marks markets with no analogue backing yet. Tap any market for its price history.
| Market | Class | Projected move | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wheat WHEATon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +1.1% model prior · unmeasured |
| 2 | Corn CORNon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +1.0% model prior · unmeasured |
Probable recommendation
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 2 analogous events (overlap‑weighted), as abnormal returns — market beta stripped, so it's the event's own effect, not the market backdrop. Shown at 20 days (persistent) and 5 days (immediate); ↺ fades = the two horizons disagree. Confidence = consistency × sample × significance.
| Asset | History says | Abnormal (20d · 5d) | Hit | n | Confidence | vs cascade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10y yield DGS10 | SHORT | -20bp · 5d -5bp | 60% | 2 | 0.15 | · |
| US dollar DXY | LONG | +1.1% · 5d -0.1% ↺ fades | 40% | 2 | 0.00 | · |