What if a pollinator collapse slashes fruit, nut and oilseed crops?
Pollinator collapse spikes pollinator-dependent specialty crops — almonds, fruit, oilseeds — not the wheat/corn (wind-pollinated) the roots imply. Rhymes with the 2013 California almond pollination crunch when collapsing bee colonies drove pollination-service and almond costs up. The current root map is broken (an invalid 'WHEAT': 6.0); transmission is via specialty-crop/oilseed prices and food CPI, and California/Central-Valley ag exposure, on a multi-year horizon.
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 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. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A continental insect-pollinator die-off slashes yields of fruits, nuts and oilseeds, spiking specialty-crop and almond prices. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Food inflation ▲ · Climate/crop supply ▲ · Fertilizer cost ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.