Almanacs appeal to wider audience than just farmers

By ADRIAN HIGGINS WASHINGTON POST

LITTLE ROCK — Here are three words you might expect to cause instant seizure with an Internet search engine: Old. Farmer’s. Almanac.

And yet, those canny New England Yankees who publish the annual Old Farmer’s Almanac have just put out No. 218 in seeming blithe indifference to the seismic shifts that have rocked traditional print media in the digital age.

The almanac ($5.99 at al manac.com), as it happens, predicts earthquakes and a lot of other natural phenomena, and describes how we should live with them, advising on such things as the moment to start a diet and the best day to slaughter a pig (for you, presumably, not the pig). It all has to do with the alignment of the firmament, or something like that.

Its philosophy is a bit weird and wacky, but it reaches deep into the agrarian roots and folkloric traditions of America, and it still resonates with more than 3 million readers.

An almanac is an astronomic and astrological calendar of the heavens. That was the core of the first almanac, published by Robert B. Thomas in 1792, and remains the heart of the current one. The look is still old - cheap paper, black ink and lots of charts and symbols - although I wish the editors would go back to styling the letter “s” as “f.” Thomas admonished that May “is a very bufy month with farmers and gardners. Uncover your afparagus bed. Turn your young cattle into the wood lands, fo as to fave your paftures.” Thomas was one fmart cookie.

And what of the pastures of our weather? Long-range weather prediction is the stock in trade of almanacs, and though the Old Farmer’s Almanac claims with a straight face 80 percent accuracy, and its rival, the Farmers’ Almanac, 80 percent to 85 percent, their forecasts for the coastal mid-Atlantic region this winter are quite different. The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts a cold and snowy season; the Farmers’ Almanac forecasts one of normal temperatures and precipitation.

Janice Stillman, editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, said that “we use satellite data, state-of-the-art information. It’s just the interpretation of that information and the inclusion of activity of the sun into our forecast that distinguishes us from just about everybody else.” Did we mention the ace in the hole? “We have a secret formula,” she said, “the calculations of which even I don’t know.”

The Farmers’ Almanac ($5.99 at store.farmersalma nac.com), which uses its own top-secret formula, mentions that in 2007 its winter forecast was even more accurate than that of Pennsylvania groundhog Punxsutawney Phil.

I agreed to meet Stillman. She gave me copies of the 2010 almanac, but the one I was salivating for was the 2009 edition, so I could check its accuracy.

I have figured out that the key to weather forecasting in general and the almanacs in particular is to hedge your bets. The Old Farmer’s Almanac lumps the country into 16 regions.

“Anybody can put out a forecast, but the issue is the track record of verification,” said Antonio Busalacchi, a professor in the University of Maryland’s department of atmospheric and oceanic science.

The long-range outlooks of the National Weather Service, for example, have improved in recent years through new skills and technology. One of the basics of science is that you give your experimental data to others, Busalacchi said, so they can reproduce the results. “That’s not the case,” he said, when you have “a secret formula.”

Perhaps I’m missing the point. “It’s about the belief that nature has its ways,” Stillman said. “If you think it’s going to rain because the cows lie down.”

What’s important about the almanac is that it continues to transport us back to a time when we were much closer to the cycles of nature; our ability to feed ourselves depended on that.

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