> This decision, though difficult, reflects the growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the Almanac in today’s chaotic media environment.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does something like this exist for weather prediction worldwide?
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.
Especially as data centers start displacing the amber waves of grain in America's hinterlands.
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.
"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”.
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...
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.
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.
> 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…
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
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
Wow, I had never heard of that new one until today! Was worried for a bit.
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.
Coincidentally, the temperatures in the Farmer's Almanac are all in Kelvin.
> 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.
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
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 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
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.
> 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.
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...
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
[dead]