💰 The Economic Value of Pollination

About this simulation

Economists estimate pollination's contribution to agriculture by comparing a crop's market value with pollinators to its expected yield without them — the "dependence ratio" method. Crops vary enormously in how reliant they are on animal pollinators: almonds are almost entirely dependent, apples and most fruit are highly dependent, coffee is moderately dependent, and wind-pollinated staples like wheat need none at all.

How it works

• Bees fly between the hive and orchard rows; each successful visit nudges a flower toward fruit set.
• Effective pollination rate combines pollinator population with colony health — a large but sick population still pollinates poorly.
• Orchard value = baseline (non-pollinator) yield value + pollinator-attributable yield value, scaled by the crop's dependency ratio and the market price index.
• The right-hand bars compare all four crops at once, so you can see how the same pollinator decline devastates almonds while barely touching wheat.

Controls

• Pollinator population — how many bees are actively foraging the orchard.
• Colony health decline — simulates disease, pesticide exposure or habitat loss reducing per-bee effectiveness.
• Market price index — scales crop prices, showing how value estimates move with markets even when biology doesn't change.
• Orchard crop — switch which crop's trees and dependency ratio are modeled.

Did you know?

Widely cited global estimates put the annual value of animal pollination to agricultural output somewhere between $235–577 billion, concentrated overwhelmingly in high-dependency fruit, nut and vegetable crops rather than in staple grains.