In the early 1990's, during my days as a Comp. Sci. prof, I was so excited about the emergence of the internet. When I saw the Mosaic browser (a precursor to Netscape and later Firefox) I knew the world had changed for the better. Now I have such mixed feelings. Magazines (like the Farmers Almanac) either go online completely or just disappear. They just cannot compete for advertising dollars with Google. And small family run local retail stores, offering not just goods, but a social hub for people are shutting their doors because how can they compete with the convenience of Amazon. Much has been gained from the internet, and much has been lost.
The aspect of small local stores functioning as a social hub really hits hard. The social hub, such as it is now, can be so much larger and less personal that it really does feel like a loss (a negative even).
Is the social hub now something like Instagram or a specific forum/subreddit/space for a school or neighborhood? These are really insufficient replacements and people that grew up knowing nothing else likely do not realize just how insufficient they are.
Thank you, this is the one I recall from my youth (having them around the house). I did not realize there was another one with an almost identical name (this post).
Looks like it’s not a case of a fork and but rather of different publishers all trying to serve a common need with a well understood formula. There used to be many almanacs, then there were two, now there is one.
In Italy, where I grew up, my grandparents used to read the Almanacco di Barbanera; the first edition came out in 1762. It is still around https://www.barbanera.it/
> This decision, though difficult, reflects the growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the Almanac in today’s chaotic media environment.
I think they simply don't know what to do next. In the past century, you could write a book with good content, put it on a shelf, and people would pay money for it.
Then at some point, book stores stopped existing. Some turned into gift stores where the book was some decoration you'd put on the shelf to add aesthetic to the room.
So a lot of things went digital. But nobody wants to pay for digital information. You'd think almanacs would be popular in the era of overinformation.
What channel next? YT shorts? TikTok? Do farmers even use LinkedIn? How do you deal with bots that grab all the information you put out there and repackage it into a $20/month subscription?
They didn't, you're right, but book stores themselves are on the decline [1]. Borders brick and mortar footprint is gone in the U.S. and they used to be the #2 bookseller. Barnes and Noble is holding on, thankfully. I love physical books and just the quiet ambience of a good bookstore.
Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.
Over the 200 years, most of the readers may have been farmers, or at least lived or worked on farms. That would have been much of the population back then.
it means that the almanac does not bring in enough profit to make it worthwhile to continue or to find a buyer for the company, and the owners are also aware that many of the same profit related issues are in the public discourse as affecting (formerly-)print media in the now-digital market, so the owners conclude that their financial are part of the general trend in the industry rather than to specific problems with the business formula they have used for over 200 years.
These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.
Ageism aside, your stereotype of young people today is about a decade out of date. It doesn't sound like you've been to a book store in America since 2015.
I see high schoolers gathered around the magazine racks at the book store every time I visit, which is at least weekly.
In a lot of ways, nothing has changed. Blue jeans, concert shirts, and someone always walks away with a Rolling Stone.
With all the digital AI slop these days I'm starting to look for magazines again. Ones that put some effort into verification that the stories really are true.
If I had to hazard a guess I'd say how everyone has the internet in their pocket, news and entertainment being one and the same, and the fact that nobody reads books anymore
Book sales in general (across all formats) are up I think - so there are still many, many readers around. We just have many new formats (EPUB, audiobooks, reader devices, etc.) and of course population is increasing over the globe. I'm pretty sure we have the highest number of readers on the planet right now than ever before in absolute terms.
I'm not sure that's still correct. There was an uplift because of Covid and people having more spare time, but whatever more recent (2024 - 2025) sources I can find suggest the trend has reversed.
It's worth also considering demographics. If you narrow the focus to just younger generations (who, we can guess, are more addicted to smartphones) then the numbers look pretty bad. E.g.:
My son, who is away at college as a freshman this year, recently phoned me and apologized for calling me a bad dad and thanked me for not allowing him to have any devices in his bedroom after bedtime growing up, as it made him become a reader. He said he was amazed when he got to school and nobody else reads for pleasure.
Audience matters here. Most book sales have been falling. The one increase has been in romance porn with those books accounting for some 50% of all paperbacks sold at this point (they are dominating for the exact same reason porn dominates internet video content).
Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.
What exactly is the Farmer’s Almanac? I always thought it was basically a big set of historical data that helped provide a sort of statistical foundation for choices, even if the why isn’t explained.
Which seems like I can completely understand it as a practical tool in the past but fairly obsolete in modern times.
Or did it evolve, too, and was essentially modern science and maths, dressed in the trappings of a beloved cultural relic? Or is it more than ever a collection of stories and advice and other culture, and much less about the actual almanac?
Kinda all of the above. It did evolve into a scientific(-adjacent) thing, if that makes sense. My boyfriend’s parents have all of them sitting on a dedicated shelf. Interesting to read through.
They definitely leaned into being a cultural artifact. Jokes, anecdotes, stories, how-tos, homeopathic recipes for things like cough syrups, etc. They all look kinda the same so either brand consistency or to keep the nostalgia factor.
Their sun/moon/eclipse is rooted in real math foundations but their “proprietary” weather forecast model was developed when the publication began in 1792.
It’s like 30% hard astronomical data, 30% proprietary models that they’ve been using for generations and 40% storytelling.
edit for context on scientific side:
WRT forecast modeling, the publication claims ~80% accuracy [1] but it’s been found to come out to about ~50%+ under scrutiny [2]
They have to predict the weather for the year in a book that has to go through the publishing and distribution process ahead of time.
My local weather news has all the benefits of real time data and weather models yet I think their accuracy rate is just as poor when it comes to producing the 7 day outlook. It’s common to hear a forecast for rain/cold front/etc in 7 day outlook that just never materializes. Also the timing of the event if it does arrive is almost always off by a day or two. Often they have the whole town worried about something that’s definitely happening Friday, they talk about it all week, everyone is preparing, little league games getting rescheduled, etc. then only hours beforehand it’s well looks like maybe Sunday. Then Sunday comes and instead of inches of rain, it’s a sprinkle.
I’m not even trying to be critical of weather reporting, I get that it’s a crapshoot but doing it a year+ ahead of time and getting similar results/accuracy is actually quite impressive.
Even if we had perfect information at one instant in time, modeling a chaotic system going into the future becomes increasingly difficult.
We have far from perfect information and very flawed models too.
Interestingly, there seems to be some success with AI models that almost completely skip the science and jump straight to pattern recognition. It's interesting to think of modern 10-day weather forecasting going back to its old almanac roots.
I didn't study too much meteorology in undergrad, but one thing impressed upon us is that any forecast beyond maybe 3 days is basically guesswork.
I think what might be getting observed here is that when forecasting that many days out, the local data becomes so unimportant to the model's outcome that the model is just reflecting historical climate trends. Which kind of makes both the same kind of model. Ie. when forecasting tomorrow, the current temperature and pressure data really makes a difference. But once pushed to 7 days, those data essentially become a proxy for typical weather at that time of year, possibly down-weighted by a lot.
I just woke up and I feel like I'm doing a very poor job trying to describe this.
That depends on what you care about. Will it rain at a specific date/time - getting that for tomorrow is hard, much less a year. However you can often predict if this will be a wet or dry year with reasonable accuracy and that is important information (farmers plant different seeds). I doubt their model is very good at this, but science can do well enough.
This comment appears to confuse the Farmers' Almanac (published since 1818) with the Old Farmer's Almanac (published since 1792). It's really unclear which one you're talking about.
"The 2026 Old Farmer's Almanac" provides weather forecasts, astronomical data, and practical wisdom for those living close to the earth, continuing its tradition since 1792."
Stands to reason, not just in name, but because The Farmer's Almanac was a spin on The Old Farmer's Almanac that was geared more towards the growing urban population.
Huh, this always seemed like such an institution it never occurred to me that people have to produce Farmers' Almanac. Which of course they do. Didn't have this on my bingo card today, makes me a little sad.
I'm not a farmer, but I have relied on the farmers almanac before when planning vacations months in advance. It's been surprisingly accurate at determining whether a given week would have rain, snow, or sun. I have no idea how they did it but I would love to see their weather prediction system open sourced if they're going to be shutting down.
They do detailed scoring of their predictions and it's based on rigorous physical modeling (navier stokes) so they know that it's better than chance. FA hasn't held up well to such scrutiny.
Sadly it would never work for the British Isles, that much I can guarantee you. Our weather resists all forms of prediction found to be reliable elsewhere, and I doubt AI enhancements over the next few years will make much of a dent in the problem.
I’ve tried all manner of weather services and none of them really do a really good job of any level of forecasting. They do however excel at supplying me with information I can get just by looking out the window.
If anyone is interested in seeing older almanac(k)s, or at least texts with the word in their titles, the Internet Archive has scans of thousands. One chosen at random:
This is the one my mind went to, mostly because that cover is so familiar. Granted, I never invested much time in either but was always glad they existed.
wow thanks for leaving this comment - i now realize two things:
1. the farmer's almanac i thought of when i saw the title and even read the article is not going anywhere
2. i have never before heard of the farmer's almanac referred to in this notice
If you’re treating a forecast as a single Bernoulli trial, wouldn’t that make them 60% accurate for the opposite of their prediction?
Which is a silly assumption; a forecast isn’t a single yes-no event. it’s not obvious to me that 50% is the worst case success rate.
Would be more interesting to compare their forecast to something like a long term NOAA forecast, but I don’t believe such a thing exists because calculating the future is very expensive.
The original editor hasn't wanted to anymore since he died in 01852, 173 years ago, so that's not it. Surely what is happening is that people don't buy reference books much anymore, and the core market of farmers gets smaller every year.
> the core market of farmers gets smaller every year.
While the Farmer's Almanac doesn't go out of its way to prevent farmers from reading it or anything, it was really geared more towards suburbanites with an interest in things like gardening.
The Old Farmer's Almanac is more geared towards farmers, but there is no signs of it ending publication.
That's some serious forward thinking you've got going on with your date format there. I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.
OTOH, if it was just a typo - keep it to yourself, I don't wanna know. I'm all in - 5 digit years is a thing now.
> I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.
Please don't, it's highly irritating and usually just serves as a way to get people to discuss the leading zero rather than the subject they were really interested in in the first place. Leading zeros aren't a thing for a reason. It's about as useful as expressing the temperature in Kelvin.
Degrees Kelvin has its place, just as leading zeros. The Farmer's Almanac may have a point but if they do I can't see it and to put a leading zero in front of a year is just annoying. Think about it: how would you pronounce the dates from now on, are you really going to say 'Today is the 7th of november of zero-two-zero-two-five'? And why stop at one zero, really forward thinking people should start counting from the big bang up, that's as close as you can get to the Kelvin analogy, might as well take it all the way then.
Well said. Five-digit years are the Shadow the Hedgehog of rationalism. But he successfully derailed the thread and took the spotlight for himself, so... mission accomplished, I guess.
If they aren't a thing, why are we talking about them? Clearly they're a thing. And not even an obscure thing. If you've ever used commonly used representations like ZIP codes, bank account numbers, or serial numbers you'll no doubt have encountered it before. And that even goes for dates. ISO 8601, for example, requires leading zeros, including for the year component. "1" is not considered a valid year under that standard. It must be represented as "0001". Granted, ISO 8601 only requires a minimum of four characters to represent the year, but expecting at least five characters is conceptually just as valid.
The question asks why we're talking about something that is purportedly not a thing, not a quest to find further confirmation of it being a thing. Swing and a miss.
this thing where someone performs an in group practice (the leading zero behavior) to garner interest, and then another in group member appears to try to recruit the curious person who takes the bait, that y'all are doing?
it's creepy cult behavior, and the "Long Now" name and framing focused on the infinite isn't helping
RFC 2550 Section 3.1 has years from 0000 to 9999 as four digit but zero padded (so the fall of Rome was 0476). It then gets appropriately weird as it was published April 1, 1999.
> That's some serious forward thinking you've got going on with your date format there. I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.
I like this.
I wonder what other conventions we could break by being "forward-thinking" in this sense.
Past tense for all proper names ("America was...", "Google was..."), prices pegged to energy equivalents (bananas were priced at 10 kWh). Describing life on the North American Plate under Alpha Centauri aligned constellations...
Those are all awkward. The date thing is just smooth.
They assert "Stay tuned here for more updates" on X, suggesting a change in the way they are doing things rather than not doing it in any capacity anymore.
You will see accelerated extinction of many members of the business species. The good members of the species can't adapt quickly with the pace of changes that are brought in by the excessive want (greed) and excessive power (knowledge) by other members of the species. Business is the only species where members of the race compete with other members of the own race, and not with other species. In natural species, internal competition happens only for mating rights and food, but not to kill each other.
Capitalism is unnatural - it allows rapid consolidation of the businesses, leading to colonial style of empires. Colonial empires fell due to local people's assertion of their ownership of the land. Business workers have no such bond with the companies. They can't resurrect their businesses once gobbled up by the mega companies.
I know it has a tradition behind it, but you can't just make shit up and just expect people in this technical age to be okay with it. I used to peruse my Grandmother's Reader's Digest as a kid and never really understood that one, either.
It reprinted articles from other popular magazines, often in an abridged format (shortened, glossing over the boring details). I think by the 1980s though, quite a few of the articles were original.
And still some of IT's biggest trends right now are LLMs, which essentially make shit up on an industrial scale.
What is going to be lost is more than an old book for old people: It's the folklore associated with it, the - and I mean that in the most positive meaning of the word - myths. The same kind of old magic that vanished when 'Weekly World News' stopped publication, or when MAD stopped being published monthly.
Obviously stuff like lunar phases is easy to document in a forward-looking way.
But yeah, this is a book claiming on the front cover to be able to tell you the best time to get married? lol
I also think that the general purpose nature of the book serves it poorly. It seems to cram together seemingly unrelated topics: life advice, gardening advice, kitchen tips, astrology, etc. This probably made a lot of sense before the modern media landscape, in the days when entertainment was a little more hard to come by.
Some things sadly do have their time and place. We aren’t getting this back just like we aren’t getting back a nation where everyone watched the same 3 channels on their television.
> But yeah, this is a book claiming on the front cover to be able to tell you the best time to get married? lol
A quick perusal of the "best day" calendar — which is presumably what that refers to — suggests that it believes the best time to get married is on days we call the weekend. Which seems pretty fair. I've never been to a wedding that wasn't on a weekend. That is when most people seem to want to get married. Not exactly ground-breaking information, of course, but practical in some very limited sense; likely more useful than lunar phase schedules for the average person.
> We aren’t getting this back
I'm not sure it was ever lost. The most notable one in this space, the Old Farmer's Almanac, is still going. The departure of The Farmer's Almanac means one less competitor than before, but the "Almanac" genre remains filled with quite a number of publications that show no signs of stopping. Individual businesses step out of their respective markets all the time. That is nothing unusual (although a 200+ year run is noteworthy, granted).
> just like we aren’t getting back a nation where everyone watched the same 3 channels on their television.
Uh, Spain had this counterpart named "El Calendario Zaragozano" (The Zaragozan calendar) which looks like 120 years old or more... in the current edition and layout. It had ephemerides, farming related weather 'preditions', sowing dates, religious holydays, farming tips, big flea market day listings, old idioms, famous quotes and so on.
In the early 1990's, during my days as a Comp. Sci. prof, I was so excited about the emergence of the internet. When I saw the Mosaic browser (a precursor to Netscape and later Firefox) I knew the world had changed for the better. Now I have such mixed feelings. Magazines (like the Farmers Almanac) either go online completely or just disappear. They just cannot compete for advertising dollars with Google. And small family run local retail stores, offering not just goods, but a social hub for people are shutting their doors because how can they compete with the convenience of Amazon. Much has been gained from the internet, and much has been lost.
The aspect of small local stores functioning as a social hub really hits hard. The social hub, such as it is now, can be so much larger and less personal that it really does feel like a loss (a negative even).
Is the social hub now something like Instagram or a specific forum/subreddit/space for a school or neighborhood? These are really insufficient replacements and people that grew up knowing nothing else likely do not realize just how insufficient they are.
There is still the Old Farmer’s Almanac https://www.almanac.com/old-farmers-almanac-233-years-and-st...
Oh, I thought this was the one that was closing down!
Which really surprised me. Ben Franklin's version is a really strong brand so it makes sense it's some other Farmer's Almanac that's shutting down.
Thank you, this is the one I recall from my youth (having them around the house). I did not realize there was another one with an almost identical name (this post).
Why was there two? Linked article doesn't really say why the confusion exists, other than that there are 2 almanacs.
Looks like it’s not a case of a fork and but rather of different publishers all trying to serve a common need with a well understood formula. There used to be many almanacs, then there were two, now there is one.
On the other side of the pond there are more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Moore%27s_Almanack in England published since 1697 and a similarly named one (without the k) in Ireland, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Moore%27s_Almanac since 1764
In Italy, where I grew up, my grandparents used to read the Almanacco di Barbanera; the first edition came out in 1762. It is still around https://www.barbanera.it/
barbanera = black beard
This press release has a bit more explanation:
https://www.farmersalmanac.com/end-of-an-era-farmers-almanac...
> This decision, though difficult, reflects the growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the Almanac in today’s chaotic media environment.
Hardly an explanation, what is meant by chaotic media environment?
I think they simply don't know what to do next. In the past century, you could write a book with good content, put it on a shelf, and people would pay money for it.
Then at some point, book stores stopped existing. Some turned into gift stores where the book was some decoration you'd put on the shelf to add aesthetic to the room.
So a lot of things went digital. But nobody wants to pay for digital information. You'd think almanacs would be popular in the era of overinformation.
What channel next? YT shorts? TikTok? Do farmers even use LinkedIn? How do you deal with bots that grab all the information you put out there and repackage it into a $20/month subscription?
Book stores did not stop existing. They are everywhere. Book sales are up in recent times.
They didn't, you're right, but book stores themselves are on the decline [1]. Borders brick and mortar footprint is gone in the U.S. and they used to be the #2 bookseller. Barnes and Noble is holding on, thankfully. I love physical books and just the quiet ambience of a good bookstore.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/do-not-turn-t...
Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.
Despite the name "farmers" I doubt the majority of customers were farmers, at least not in the last 50 years or so.
Over the 200 years, most of the readers may have been farmers, or at least lived or worked on farms. That would have been much of the population back then.
Bro book sales are at a record high right now and barnes and noble is opening lots of stores
Without snark, I believe it just means they’re not making money, likely because people consume less “published media” nowadays
>what is meant by chaotic media environment?
it means that the almanac does not bring in enough profit to make it worthwhile to continue or to find a buyer for the company, and the owners are also aware that many of the same profit related issues are in the public discourse as affecting (formerly-)print media in the now-digital market, so the owners conclude that their financial are part of the general trend in the industry rather than to specific problems with the business formula they have used for over 200 years.
Their audience is old people who buy the book at the cashier line at Walmart.
Both their customer base and sales outlet is dying off.
These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.
These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.
Ageism aside, your stereotype of young people today is about a decade out of date. It doesn't sound like you've been to a book store in America since 2015.
I see high schoolers gathered around the magazine racks at the book store every time I visit, which is at least weekly.
In a lot of ways, nothing has changed. Blue jeans, concert shirts, and someone always walks away with a Rolling Stone.
With all the digital AI slop these days I'm starting to look for magazines again. Ones that put some effort into verification that the stories really are true.
If I had to hazard a guess I'd say how everyone has the internet in their pocket, news and entertainment being one and the same, and the fact that nobody reads books anymore
Book sales in general (across all formats) are up I think - so there are still many, many readers around. We just have many new formats (EPUB, audiobooks, reader devices, etc.) and of course population is increasing over the globe. I'm pretty sure we have the highest number of readers on the planet right now than ever before in absolute terms.
I'm not sure that's still correct. There was an uplift because of Covid and people having more spare time, but whatever more recent (2024 - 2025) sources I can find suggest the trend has reversed.
It's worth also considering demographics. If you narrow the focus to just younger generations (who, we can guess, are more addicted to smartphones) then the numbers look pretty bad. E.g.:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/05/report-fall-in...
My son, who is away at college as a freshman this year, recently phoned me and apologized for calling me a bad dad and thanked me for not allowing him to have any devices in his bedroom after bedtime growing up, as it made him become a reader. He said he was amazed when he got to school and nobody else reads for pleasure.
Audience matters here. Most book sales have been falling. The one increase has been in romance porn with those books accounting for some 50% of all paperbacks sold at this point (they are dominating for the exact same reason porn dominates internet video content).
Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.
[dead]
You can Google or ask AI instead of reference a book
Like asking for a book at the library in Rollerball?
What exactly is the Farmer’s Almanac? I always thought it was basically a big set of historical data that helped provide a sort of statistical foundation for choices, even if the why isn’t explained.
Which seems like I can completely understand it as a practical tool in the past but fairly obsolete in modern times.
Or did it evolve, too, and was essentially modern science and maths, dressed in the trappings of a beloved cultural relic? Or is it more than ever a collection of stories and advice and other culture, and much less about the actual almanac?
Kinda all of the above. It did evolve into a scientific(-adjacent) thing, if that makes sense. My boyfriend’s parents have all of them sitting on a dedicated shelf. Interesting to read through.
They definitely leaned into being a cultural artifact. Jokes, anecdotes, stories, how-tos, homeopathic recipes for things like cough syrups, etc. They all look kinda the same so either brand consistency or to keep the nostalgia factor.
Their sun/moon/eclipse is rooted in real math foundations but their “proprietary” weather forecast model was developed when the publication began in 1792.
It’s like 30% hard astronomical data, 30% proprietary models that they’ve been using for generations and 40% storytelling.
edit for context on scientific side:
WRT forecast modeling, the publication claims ~80% accuracy [1] but it’s been found to come out to about ~50%+ under scrutiny [2]
[1] https://www.almanac.com/2026-old-farmers-almanac
[2] https://climate.colostate.edu/blog/index.php/2024/08/23/shou...
They have to predict the weather for the year in a book that has to go through the publishing and distribution process ahead of time.
My local weather news has all the benefits of real time data and weather models yet I think their accuracy rate is just as poor when it comes to producing the 7 day outlook. It’s common to hear a forecast for rain/cold front/etc in 7 day outlook that just never materializes. Also the timing of the event if it does arrive is almost always off by a day or two. Often they have the whole town worried about something that’s definitely happening Friday, they talk about it all week, everyone is preparing, little league games getting rescheduled, etc. then only hours beforehand it’s well looks like maybe Sunday. Then Sunday comes and instead of inches of rain, it’s a sprinkle.
I’m not even trying to be critical of weather reporting, I get that it’s a crapshoot but doing it a year+ ahead of time and getting similar results/accuracy is actually quite impressive.
Even if we had perfect information at one instant in time, modeling a chaotic system going into the future becomes increasingly difficult.
We have far from perfect information and very flawed models too.
Interestingly, there seems to be some success with AI models that almost completely skip the science and jump straight to pattern recognition. It's interesting to think of modern 10-day weather forecasting going back to its old almanac roots.
I didn't study too much meteorology in undergrad, but one thing impressed upon us is that any forecast beyond maybe 3 days is basically guesswork.
I think what might be getting observed here is that when forecasting that many days out, the local data becomes so unimportant to the model's outcome that the model is just reflecting historical climate trends. Which kind of makes both the same kind of model. Ie. when forecasting tomorrow, the current temperature and pressure data really makes a difference. But once pushed to 7 days, those data essentially become a proxy for typical weather at that time of year, possibly down-weighted by a lot.
I just woke up and I feel like I'm doing a very poor job trying to describe this.
That depends on what you care about. Will it rain at a specific date/time - getting that for tomorrow is hard, much less a year. However you can often predict if this will be a wet or dry year with reasonable accuracy and that is important information (farmers plant different seeds). I doubt their model is very good at this, but science can do well enough.
This comment appears to confuse the Farmers' Almanac (published since 1818) with the Old Farmer's Almanac (published since 1792). It's really unclear which one you're talking about.
"The 2026 Old Farmer's Almanac" provides weather forecasts, astronomical data, and practical wisdom for those living close to the earth, continuing its tradition since 1792."
The parent is asking about the Farmer's Almanac (the one bidding farewell), first published in 1818.
I actually don’t realize there were two! I’m guessing there’s a history here involving a fork.
But if you'd like to see a sample of _Old_ Farmer's Almanac, their 2026 issue could be accessed here: https://reader.mediawiremobile.com/TheOldFarmersAlmanac/issu...
I always enjoy reading through those tabulated stuff; see pp. 280-281.
> I’m guessing there’s a history here involving a fork.
This is no direct relationship. Just a case of a competitor deciding to compete in the marketplace.
Seems like the original already named it wisely. If it’s 1820 and I’m a farmer, I’m definitely getting my almanac from an “old farmer”.
Stands to reason, not just in name, but because The Farmer's Almanac was a spin on The Old Farmer's Almanac that was geared more towards the growing urban population.
Huh, this always seemed like such an institution it never occurred to me that people have to produce Farmers' Almanac. Which of course they do. Didn't have this on my bingo card today, makes me a little sad.
The brand has 200 years of value. They could easily sell it. It’s a respectable decision to shut it down instead.
I bet County Highway would be interested in acquiring this. https://www.countyhighway.com/about
AI can replace them too. The Server Farmers’ Almanac will be in high demand.
Content farmers, you mean.
Engagement Farmers Almanac, A Guide to Brainrot
Isn't the Server Farmer's Almanac basically stuff like the UNIX handbook and the like?
Especially as data centers start displacing the amber waves of grain in America's hinterlands.
Ah yes, the soul of humanity reduced to silicon.
I skim both almanac products each year. Both have helpful little home tips and quite a bit of gardening advice. Sad to see them go.
Should have paid the $9 instead of just skimming...
I'm not a farmer, but I have relied on the farmers almanac before when planning vacations months in advance. It's been surprisingly accurate at determining whether a given week would have rain, snow, or sun. I have no idea how they did it but I would love to see their weather prediction system open sourced if they're going to be shutting down.
Statistical averages and confirmation bias.
Better yet, use the NWS climate outlook, based on actual science: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/
They do detailed scoring of their predictions and it's based on rigorous physical modeling (navier stokes) so they know that it's better than chance. FA hasn't held up well to such scrutiny.
For Europe, use ECMWF, they provide great data: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts
Does something like this exist for weather prediction worldwide?
Sadly it would never work for the British Isles, that much I can guarantee you. Our weather resists all forms of prediction found to be reliable elsewhere, and I doubt AI enhancements over the next few years will make much of a dent in the problem.
I’ve tried all manner of weather services and none of them really do a really good job of any level of forecasting. They do however excel at supplying me with information I can get just by looking out the window.
I’ll put a bowl of water in the moonlight tonight to bring blessings to the generations of authors farming our collective reality framing.
I think this is from the Old Farmer's Almanac
The full moon was yesterday unfortunately!
There's probably one for witches that's still all the rage on the east coast.
If anyone is interested in seeing older almanac(k)s, or at least texts with the word in their titles, the Internet Archive has scans of thousands. One chosen at random:
The Illustrated Phrenological Almanac
https://archive.org/details/illustratedphren1852fowl/mode/2u...
Not to be confused with Old Farmer's Almanac (est. 1792) and yet sad to see a 200 years old periodical closing up shop.
https://www.almanac.com/old-farmers-almanac-233-years-and-st...
They appear experienced at navigating this confusion
Damn, I would expect at least a word of courtesy towards a fellow multicentennial publication.
We all know they're popping the champagne
Saying "after an incredible 200+ year run." seems enough chivalrous for me.
This is the one my mind went to, mostly because that cover is so familiar. Granted, I never invested much time in either but was always glad they existed.
wow thanks for leaving this comment - i now realize two things:
1. the farmer's almanac i thought of when i saw the title and even read the article is not going anywhere 2. i have never before heard of the farmer's almanac referred to in this notice
the old farmers almanac is the one people are probably more familiar with
Does this mean they can now rename the Old Farmer's Almanac to the Farmer's Almanac?
Wow, I had never heard of that new one until today! Was worried for a bit.
Good riddance. These guys had like 40% forecast accuracy, worse than random. When they say the winter will warmer it will be colder and vice versa.
If you’re treating a forecast as a single Bernoulli trial, wouldn’t that make them 60% accurate for the opposite of their prediction?
Which is a silly assumption; a forecast isn’t a single yes-no event. it’s not obvious to me that 50% is the worst case success rate.
Would be more interesting to compare their forecast to something like a long term NOAA forecast, but I don’t believe such a thing exists because calculating the future is very expensive.
> Best known for its long-range weather predictions
I wonder if a changing climate makes the predictions in the almanac less useful too
When all you have is a hammer…
Interesting, I appreciate how they gave no reasons, I’m also curious if there is more details beyond “we don’t want to anymore”
Would be pretty cool if it was that simple, that reason needs more representation and is how I run my entrepreneurial endeavors
The original editor hasn't wanted to anymore since he died in 01852, 173 years ago, so that's not it. Surely what is happening is that people don't buy reference books much anymore, and the core market of farmers gets smaller every year.
> the core market of farmers gets smaller every year.
While the Farmer's Almanac doesn't go out of its way to prevent farmers from reading it or anything, it was really geared more towards suburbanites with an interest in things like gardening.
The Old Farmer's Almanac is more geared towards farmers, but there is no signs of it ending publication.
> 01852, 173 years ago
That's some serious forward thinking you've got going on with your date format there. I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.
OTOH, if it was just a typo - keep it to yourself, I don't wanna know. I'm all in - 5 digit years is a thing now.
> I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.
Please don't, it's highly irritating and usually just serves as a way to get people to discuss the leading zero rather than the subject they were really interested in in the first place. Leading zeros aren't a thing for a reason. It's about as useful as expressing the temperature in Kelvin.
It’s big “look at me” energy, coupled with that user citing years way more often than most.
Some person: I like yams.
Person in question: Me too, since I had my first one in 01985 or so.
Coincidentally, the temperatures in the Farmer's Almanac are all in Kelvin.
Degrees Kelvin has its place, just as leading zeros. The Farmer's Almanac may have a point but if they do I can't see it and to put a leading zero in front of a year is just annoying. Think about it: how would you pronounce the dates from now on, are you really going to say 'Today is the 7th of november of zero-two-zero-two-five'? And why stop at one zero, really forward thinking people should start counting from the big bang up, that's as close as you can get to the Kelvin analogy, might as well take it all the way then.
If they do indeed use Kelvin, perhaps it's to reduce percent error? :)
> Degrees Kelvin
Not degrees. The unit is simply the kelvin.
You are right.
Well said. Five-digit years are the Shadow the Hedgehog of rationalism. But he successfully derailed the thread and took the spotlight for himself, so... mission accomplished, I guess.
Octal schmoctal eh
> Leading zeros aren't a thing for a reason.
If they aren't a thing, why are we talking about them? Clearly they're a thing. And not even an obscure thing. If you've ever used commonly used representations like ZIP codes, bank account numbers, or serial numbers you'll no doubt have encountered it before. And that even goes for dates. ISO 8601, for example, requires leading zeros, including for the year component. "1" is not considered a valid year under that standard. It must be represented as "0001". Granted, ISO 8601 only requires a minimum of four characters to represent the year, but expecting at least five characters is conceptually just as valid.
> If they aren't a thing, why are we talking about them?
Because someone decided to break convention and use one in a four-digit year.
The question asks why we're talking about something that is purportedly not a thing, not a quest to find further confirmation of it being a thing. Swing and a miss.
I'm sorry about your miss there.
Don't be. Computers don't have feelings.
You might find your crowd among the Long Now Foundation, they love their 5-digit years.
this thing where someone performs an in group practice (the leading zero behavior) to garner interest, and then another in group member appears to try to recruit the curious person who takes the bait, that y'all are doing?
it's creepy cult behavior, and the "Long Now" name and framing focused on the infinite isn't helping
RFC 2550 Section 3.1 has years from 0000 to 9999 as four digit but zero padded (so the fall of Rome was 0476). It then gets appropriately weird as it was published April 1, 1999.
You might also enjoy the Kurzgesagt human era calendar - https://youtu.be/29pN-2KM2DI - https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar
Nobody seems to care about the y100k problem this introduces.
001852 is safe for a million years!
Only losers don't pad dates out to 10 digits to account for when Donald Trump passes off his earthly coil.
Big miss on your name not being Alive-in-0000002025
> That's some serious forward thinking you've got going on with your date format there. I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.
I like this.
I wonder what other conventions we could break by being "forward-thinking" in this sense.
Past tense for all proper names ("America was...", "Google was..."), prices pegged to energy equivalents (bananas were priced at 10 kWh). Describing life on the North American Plate under Alpha Centauri aligned constellations...
Those are all awkward. The date thing is just smooth.
Nobody posted [1] yet, it feels like it's needed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
Wow, an organisation worried about dealing with the date flipover in 010000. Very forward thinking
I see what you did there
error: invalid digit "8" in octal constant
Unless he's a vampire. Those bastards are very cunning at hiding how long they live for.
> 01852, 173 years ago
Certainly not.
They assert "Stay tuned here for more updates" on X, suggesting a change in the way they are doing things rather than not doing it in any capacity anymore.
Tis a bit curious R.I.P.
You will see accelerated extinction of many members of the business species. The good members of the species can't adapt quickly with the pace of changes that are brought in by the excessive want (greed) and excessive power (knowledge) by other members of the species. Business is the only species where members of the race compete with other members of the own race, and not with other species. In natural species, internal competition happens only for mating rights and food, but not to kill each other.
Capitalism is unnatural - it allows rapid consolidation of the businesses, leading to colonial style of empires. Colonial empires fell due to local people's assertion of their ownership of the land. Business workers have no such bond with the companies. They can't resurrect their businesses once gobbled up by the mega companies.
I know it has a tradition behind it, but you can't just make shit up and just expect people in this technical age to be okay with it. I used to peruse my Grandmother's Reader's Digest as a kid and never really understood that one, either.
Readers Digest was just a general interest collection of articles, wasn’t it? I don’t remember it being particularly made-up.
I mainly read it for the jokes, as I recall.
I used to look forward to RD in the pre internet times, it was great medium form reading.
It reprinted articles from other popular magazines, often in an abridged format (shortened, glossing over the boring details). I think by the 1980s though, quite a few of the articles were original.
And still some of IT's biggest trends right now are LLMs, which essentially make shit up on an industrial scale.
What is going to be lost is more than an old book for old people: It's the folklore associated with it, the - and I mean that in the most positive meaning of the word - myths. The same kind of old magic that vanished when 'Weekly World News' stopped publication, or when MAD stopped being published monthly.
Was going to say this - making shit up is currently driving most of the S&P 500's growth.
Obviously stuff like lunar phases is easy to document in a forward-looking way.
But yeah, this is a book claiming on the front cover to be able to tell you the best time to get married? lol
I also think that the general purpose nature of the book serves it poorly. It seems to cram together seemingly unrelated topics: life advice, gardening advice, kitchen tips, astrology, etc. This probably made a lot of sense before the modern media landscape, in the days when entertainment was a little more hard to come by.
Some things sadly do have their time and place. We aren’t getting this back just like we aren’t getting back a nation where everyone watched the same 3 channels on their television.
> But yeah, this is a book claiming on the front cover to be able to tell you the best time to get married? lol
A quick perusal of the "best day" calendar — which is presumably what that refers to — suggests that it believes the best time to get married is on days we call the weekend. Which seems pretty fair. I've never been to a wedding that wasn't on a weekend. That is when most people seem to want to get married. Not exactly ground-breaking information, of course, but practical in some very limited sense; likely more useful than lunar phase schedules for the average person.
> We aren’t getting this back
I'm not sure it was ever lost. The most notable one in this space, the Old Farmer's Almanac, is still going. The departure of The Farmer's Almanac means one less competitor than before, but the "Almanac" genre remains filled with quite a number of publications that show no signs of stopping. Individual businesses step out of their respective markets all the time. That is nothing unusual (although a 200+ year run is noteworthy, granted).
> just like we aren’t getting back a nation where everyone watched the same 3 channels on their television.
Now we all visit the same 3 websites instead...
Us
To be honest I've never even heard of the "Farmers Almanac", but its #2 on HN now. Am I the only one here?
I think people like the name because of nostalgia they can't connect to and the word Almanac reminding them of Back to the Future
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_Almanac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Farmer%27s_Almanac
People do know things other people do not. They are fairly notable, though obviously not as much in today's society, hence this one's retirement
Uh, Spain had this counterpart named "El Calendario Zaragozano" (The Zaragozan calendar) which looks like 120 years old or more... in the current edition and layout. It had ephemerides, farming related weather 'preditions', sowing dates, religious holydays, farming tips, big flea market day listings, old idioms, famous quotes and so on.
http://calendariozaragozano.net/almanaque-zaragozano.html
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