What if the US cattle herd shrinks to a fresh low?
Another leg of US herd liquidation is a cattle/beef trade — long live and feeder cattle to fresh records, with packer margins crushed; it is not a wheat trade. Rhymes with the 2014-15 cycle and the ongoing 2024-26 herd-low, which already pushed cattle and retail beef to all-time highs. Transmission is US beef CPI and a pull on imported lean trimmings from Australia/Brazil; mapping to wheat/corn misses the actual protein in play (and ignores that cheaper corn aids feeders).
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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 6–18 months 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. Persistent drought drives another leg of US herd liquidation below the 2026 low, pushing beef prices to fresh all-time highs. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Food inflation ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.