A Fond Farewell
farmersalmanac.com582 points by erhuve 4 days ago
582 points by erhuve 4 days ago
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.
But why do social hubs need to be places of financial transactions?
I was in Delft recently and I really loved their library/community center. Full of music practice rooms, people playing board games on the ground floor, a coffee bar and it was full of people at 8pm. It is open from 9am - 11pm M-F.
You walk or cycle there (free indoor bicycle parking). There is a movie theater across the "street" (no cars).
They didn't need to be transactional spaces, they need to be spaces that attract people regularly.
The local chicken farmer who works 16 hours a day to keep his farm running isn't going out of his way three times a week to visit the community center for board game night.
He's definitely in the local Tractor Supply store three times a week though...
It's about creating community where people naturally gather, not creating a gathering space then hoping people show up.
Consider this little anecdote from Kurt Vonnegut: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kurt-vonnegut-envelope-quo...
DAVID BRANCACCIO: There's a little sweet moment, I've got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you're heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I'm getting — I'm going to buy an envelope.
KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?
KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know…
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Rare miss from Vonnegut, it's not the computer people. We know, and we care a lot. It's the owning people.
It is the computer people. The 'owning' people were computer people that founded these companies. Its computer people that sit in these meetings and go through designing these changes and building these systems. I'm a privacy person and yesterday my boss asked me to pull up records on a users device to see a record of what they were doing and I did it even though its disgusting micromanagement that I hate.
I suspect this is the major reason for lifestyle premium fitness gyms popularity in recent years.
Getting into climbing was secondarily a health choice, but primarily a social endeavor for me.
I don’t think it’s about being “places of financial transactions” so much as it’s about places of shared necessity. Everyone has to eat, so everyone goes to the grocery store.
Community centers are great and I’m not going to argue against having “non-commercial recreation”, but the thing about having local stores as social hubs is they might be the only universally shared place of a community. Not everyone is going to want (or be able!) to visit a library, but everyone does need food and other consumables/goods.
The "shared necessity" factor also means that you regularly meet acquaintances there by accident. It just doesn't happen at the Wal-Mart or Home-Depot 15 miles away anywhere near as often as it would happen at the town general store or the local main street shopping district. Possibly because nobody actually spends time at a big box store or strip mall; they're such deeply unpleasant spaces that you basically just do what absolutely must be done and get out. So now a little extra stroll around to window shop has been replaced by extra time in the car to drive 15 miles across town in the other direction to go to some other big box store.
It's not just a small towns thing, either. The main street shopping district I had in mind just now is in the middle of Chicago. And it doesn't happen so much there, either, anymore, in the post retail apocalypse era. Now it's all bars and restaurants so people go there for a very reduced range of reasons.
I would say that "don't let perfect be the enemy of the good" here. Would universal be better? Sure. But what I saw is so much better than what we currently have here in the US.
The point is that OPEN (the name of the Delft library) is really a community center and not a library. Yes, it happens to have books. But it also has a stage for musical performances, art rooms, tables, wifi, washrooms, coffee. I would say that the only thing that is missing is a gym; there are small dance rooms in there but that's not quite the same.
But the essence here is walkable communities. Suburbs and exurbs are hostile to even small local stores because you have to drive everywhere to do anything. There is no community in visiting my Costco or even my QFC.
Take a look for yourself: https://www.opendelft.info
Quality Food Centers, Inc., better known as QFC, has 59 stores in western Washington and northwestern Oregon.
We decentralized information, and in doing so we centralized culture. I fear that we are only now coming to understand what we have wrought. I am sure that new social structures will arise to replace the old, but who is to say what lies between? It is not out of the question that even a project with noble intentions such as the web may precipitate a dark age for humanity. I don't say this as a pessimist, but as a wide-eyed realist wondering what happens when human civilization no longer requires humanity.
But if it’s so valuable… why aren’t people willing to pay for it?
Forgoing luxuries like a vacation to support local stores full of people you know and trust, that might charge 20% more for the same product, seems like an obvious thing…
That almost no Americans do in reality.
Huge sections of America/American's are incredibly poor.
Add that the highest income people were the first to switch to Amazon, and are more online first than community first. It didn't take losing too many of those customers for the economics to fall apart.
I live in a tourist town that has had a huge influx of new, higher wealth people post COVID. Surprising to me our businesses/restaurants are doing worse with this new population with more money, not better. They live here for the amenities, but other than on the mountain biking trails/ski mountain/lake (on their boats or remote beaches, detached from most people) you never see them. They work from home, but our walking trails are the sparsest I've ever seen them. None of them seem to go out to eat, especially not lunch. It's awful. And now that they are here, property prices have gone up, so more locals (and the children of locals definitely) will be priced out and replaced by work from home types who... just disappear into their houses. They buy all their gear online instead of supporting the local shops, the local knowledge, the places help organize/arrange for trail maintenance, more land into conservancy. From my one town observation modern upper middle class American's appear to be a net-loss for the local community. They are the types so into their sport they do all the own maintenance, then expect the local shop to do the 1 or 2 things they can't/don't want to do. The local shop can't survive on that little bit of work on your 'all internet bought, self maintained' stuff. They just don't get it.
If they have money to afford a vacation every few years or a RV, they are significantly richer than the vast majority of people on this planet.
So it seems like a flimsy excuse.
Lots of things have happened that have ultimately harmed these small communities.
A major problem is consolidation. A small town hardware store may have had access to multiple suppliers at one point. Those all merged together and ultimately started raising their prices in a "go away" sense to small time purchasers. That's made it incredibly hard to be a store. A big box store gets a lot more foot traffic and has more leverage against distributers which allows them to ultimately outprice a small time store.
My hometown went through this. As a kid, it had a restaurant, a grocery store, a hardware store, and an automobile repair shop. 1 by 1 those all died. The restaurant died because the community never ate there. It became a thing where you'd literally call the owner the night before so they could prepare you a meal the next day. Otherwise they had no traffic. They were too expensive for my small town so nobody would buy a lunch there. The grocery store and hardware store died from being priced out. At one point, just to keep the shelves stocked the owner literally had to buy products from Walmart to sell at the store. No distributor would sell to them.
I think to tease out the core of the problem with large businesses, capital, and society (esp. as regards the dissolution of small businesses), you need to autopsy the concepts of value and liquidity.
Money is meant to be a store of value, 'value' in this case being literally anyone considers valuable. However, it's an abstraction that doesn't quite fit over the thing it attempts to abstract - it really only captures that value if the value is something that is easy to transact. You might value a good conversation with your local grocer, or the smile you get when you pass someone you recognize in your neighborhood, but those things are left out of the money equation. Things the abstraction captures well - transactions of goods, legal representation, contracts, and lobbyists - are all of a particular stripe. Many of these are related to a projection of will; the ability to make things happen the way you want in spite of potentially mitigating factors.
One of the things that money allows is exploitation. Because of the delta between actual value and the abstraction of value, one is capable of strategically manouvering such that they capture more of the abstraction than a straight value:value transaction would warrant. This is compounded when you get tricky with laws and litigation and contracts - hard edges in the problem space become anvils you can use to hammer things to a shape that you like. Cynical strategies are quite successful here.
It is my belief that due to the recursively self-reinforcing nature of this system, it is bound to fail eventually. Because the leaks in the abstraction of value are actually a boon to some few powerful entities, the rules that govern the abstraction will fail to change and adapt and at some point the whole system becomes too heavy to support itself. As a whole, the system will eventually eat it's way to a heart attack.
Liquidity is the velocity of this process, and thus the velocity of consumption. There are pressures and systems and factors that metabolize the effects of the flow of capital, but the higher liquidity is the more burdened those systems become. We are currently in a place where the liquidity factor is > 1, by which I mean money can be spent before it is earned and most of it is (we have something like 5-20x debt to the pool of money, depending on how you measure it). This means that those deficiencies in the abstraction are accelerated and compounded by the same amount, which translates to an equal difference between the things we actually value as humans and the things we are capable of valuing as economic units.
Possible counterpoint: consumers will price in these intangibles when making purchasing decisions.
They dont get a choice. You really can’t operate a small store anymore. The distribution networks were all destroyed by the top-5 retailers.
Regional supermarkets are capped by this. The lack of third party distribution means they have to have their own sourcing and distribution. They can’t grow and are slowly being picked off of PE and bigger chains.
It’s even hard for restaurants. When I worked in restaurants in college in my region, we had 6 local produce distributors. Now you have Sysco, US Foods, two regionals, one of which just went PE, and the vertically integrated Chinese markets that prefer to do business within their circle.
I think we are going to have significant political unrest, and the rollup of everything will continue until that federal power is exerted against it. Otherwise, welcome to WalmartKrogerHomeDepot.
After 50 years of such choices being made it’s not suprising that it’s exponentially harder. The real question is why did Americans decide to do so en masse so many years ago.
We decided in the 1970s that all must be sacrificed on the alter of maximizing shareholder value.
Because if I do that, I lose my vacation and I don’t gain a local store full of people I know and trust.
Collective action problems aren’t solved by individually performing the action, and therefore the fact that people aren’t doing it doesn’t show they don’t want it.
> Collective action problems aren’t solved by individually performing the action
This is a truth that a lot of the west, particularly Americans, struggle to accept. We keep trying "the free market and individual incentives must solve all problems" over and over, and fail over and over.
Huge problems require collective action to solve. Collective action requires good coordination, strong institutions, leadership, and most importantly, the societal willingness to not always optimize for the individual's freedom/desires/expectations. None of these are currently present in America.
It's a very attractive idea. It gives you an immediate counterargument (people must prefer it this way because they're all doing it), and gives you the satisfaction of calling the other person a hypocrite (you think it's better yet you aren't doing it).
I've lost count of how many times I've had someone tell me, "If you think you should pay more taxes, you can always send the IRS some extra cash."
Any problem with externalized costs or benefits is a collective action problem. You get a benefit everyone pays for or you incur a cost which everyone pays. The individual incentive is to freeload on the resources of others. It is functionally theft.
Regulation and other government actions can solve these problems by internalizing these costs/benefits. Any solution to these problems involves collective control of individual actions, which is to say, government at some scale.
There is some irony in the people who say "taxation is theft" ignoring the theft of the commons counteracted by taxation and the government services it supports.
"Pollution is theft" would be a nice way to put the libertarian case for environmental regulation, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
You think you have a choice to buy local. It's more complicated than that.
"Local stores full of people you know and trust" is what advertising tries to approximate. Instead of forming lasting human bonds with shopkeepers and employees, we are informed by ads who we should patronize. And we pay, indirectly, for that service.
Private equity also takes its pound of flesh. Try hiring a local plumber. They'll always say they're locally owned and operated, which is a partial truth. But when you're charged $400 for 15 minutes of labor, remember that a lot of that revenue goes to private equity, far far away from your hamlet, whether you like it or not.
the McDonald's in our town says "locally owned and operated", same with the stores where everything (literally) is made in China. These sums up the absurdity of the phrase for me.
The franchise is either locally owned and operated, or it's a corporation-owned store. McDonald's doesn't permit owner-investors as franchisees, only owner-operators (at least that was the case last I knew).
It's true that it's locally O&O as someone else pointed out. The McDonald's corporation just likely owns the land and collects rent and a sales royalty from the owner. This is pretty standard and honestly, seems to me to be much more human than the big box retail business model where there is no local ownership of any kind.
Side note: Grocery Outlet if you're in the places they operate, is a completely franchised grocery store chain. In my experience in multiple towns, the local owners do a great job, and one near me donates to some excellent local charities.
Most people struggle to just to stay in front of their bills. It has nothing to do with "willing" and has everything to do with "able".
A lot of reasons, but the two big ones are:
1) the American cult of self-reliance. The idea that people will not value something they did not themselves work for, even if its given to them by a close friend or family member, is basically synonymous with "the American dream". "Socialism" is so bad to Americans that they would rather have diabetics die because they can't afford the lifesaving medicine they need, than to give handouts to such people, just for them to develop a "dependency". There's even an entire health-influencer industry built around the idea that all health problems not directly caused by trauma are because the person suffering just isn't trying hard enough to be healthy, and not, you know, because of a social and economic system that's actively corrosive to human health. "You're sick because you're too lazy to avoid trans-fats" basically the gist of RFK Jr's ideology.
2) Americans are so opposed to thinking more than 3 months ahead that all they see with that 20% price increase is the impact it has on them right now. The easy access to instant gratification is steadily eroding our ability to be patient or suffer any hardship. This has been growing for a long time (c.f. fresh fruits and vegetables of all stripes, year round) but has reached a sort of fever pitch with the advent of same-day delivery for a vast array of bits and baubles.
Those hubs still exist for things that the internet cannot replace. Barber shops, coffee shops, cafes, and other local dining, pubs and bars. Local parks, especially if you have kids, and other kid-centric events such as sports, scouts, and other activities. Adult rec leagues, gyms, volunteer orgs, etc. But certainly many have gone. There are still bookstores and specialty retailers here and there but not like we used to have.
I attend a church where most of the folks are older and they don’t seem to get it that younger people won’t just find our church like in the old days because people aren’t connected by local businesses like they used to be. I don’t mind saying on here that I attend St John’s. It doesn’t matter because there’s over 1000 other St John’s in the country. No one can find us using modern means.
> They just cannot compete for advertising dollars with Google.
If print (and other) media had not been designed around advertising revenue in the first place, things might have gone very, very differently.
Both Google and Amazon are, generally, just middlemen (intermediaries)
There is no way for producers and consumers to "compete" with intermediaries
If the internet must^1 be full of intermediaries to link producers and consumers, then at least there should be competition _amongst intermediaries_
Google and Amazon have no significant competition from other intermediaries
1. It's possible that intermediaries are unnecessary
There is still the Old Farmer’s Almanac https://www.almanac.com/old-farmers-almanac-233-years-and-st...
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).
Did we all have a Mandela moment that what we all thought was "The Farmer's Almanac" with the yellow cover actually has OLD in the title? And there is randomly this other farmer's almanac?
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/
Similarly in the Netherlands, my grandparents used to have the Enkhuizer Almanak. Also still around after 430 years https://www.almanak.nl/
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc.
The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.
Barnes & Nobles and Borders were both the ultimate in retail bookstores and also the beginning of the end of retail book stores. They killed local bookstores, and then Amazon killed them.
Maybe in some places. Growing up there was no bookstore. We had a library, and a mall far away, and there were some small book stores at the mall that continued to do just fine as B&N and Borders grew. And while everyone says Amazon killed bookstores… maybe some. But what I saw were malls dying anyway, and downtown rents growing to the point where selling just books wasn’t enough to cover costs.
But none of what you're describing actually happened. The big chains didn't kill local bookstores at all -- mom-and-pop bookstores are still ubiquitous -- and many of them are actually doing better than they used to due to the ability to list their inventory on Amazon, AbeBooks, etc.
And B&N itself is doing just fine, and is opening new locations. Borders is the only major chain that failed to adapt. Other large book retailers are also still going strong, e.g. Books-A-Million.
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...
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
> Do farmers even use LinkedIn?
Farmers don't even use the Almanac, because it's not accurate. These things are all 50/50. A coin toss in their predictions.
Well that just obviously isn't true. If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things? If nothing else, natural market forces would simply prop up the farmers who aren't wasting time and money following a completely inaccurate book.
In statistics, two things are simple: predicting the very next step, and predicting what happens in 100,000 steps. It's the part in between that's tough. Weather is a function of statistics, essentially. It's why we can tell what the weather will be like tomorrow, and why we can tell that La Nina is going to affect us this year, but why we can't tell what the weather will be like on a Thursday 4 weeks from now.
> If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things?
The same people who buy books about healing crystals, who donate to televangelists, who go to reiki "healers" and chiropractors, who believe in tarot firmly, etc.
Those people aren't in something resembling a zero-sum game, so they don't really make sense. Chiropractors sell back cracks, and the people buying that get exactly what they want.
Without snark, I believe it just means they’re not making money, likely because people consume less “published media” nowadays
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.
> Their audience is old people who buy the book at the cashier line at Walmart.
That's the Old Farmer's Almanac. I don't know where this Farmer's Almanac is on the shelves, but it's certainly not at Walmart, which carries a different publication that's even older.
Confusing names, yes, because one is TFA and the other is TOFA.
You think Walmart is dying off? Definitely not.
The retail experience is. Farmer's Almanac sat above the candy in the checkout aisle.
That's all transitioning to delivery and self-checkout. 20 years ago, you'd like 30 lanes open with eyeballs on the book. Now, in my area there's like 3-5 lanes most times.
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.
I think there's been a micro-boom in prestige periodicals. Until I kind of fell back out of love with tennis, I was a subscriber of Racquet, which is a really high quality print publication about tennis (and occasionally other racquet sports).
https://shop.racquetmag.com/products/issue-no-8?pr_prod_stra... if you're interested in seeing what a very nice tennis magazine looks like (links to shop because it's the best way to show contents)
The last couple times I cracked open a magazine it was 50% ads and I'm not sure how many articles were PR releases. Thinking of Pop Sci, Psychology Today, etc
Only 50% - that seems low. They were always more than that (except mad, though they did take ads latter I'm told).
>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.
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.
It's honestly amazing when I'm around gen z people and how addicted to phones they are.
1. The survey seems limited to UK or so. Not sure - it doesn't look like a global report.
2. Don't confuse "enjoyment" with "number of readers". The previous generation may have enjoyed it more - because there were no better options.
3. People over the globe are more educated now, and engaged in knowledge work. They must read to get work done.
4. Don't forget the "pirate book" scene - such as lib gen, Anna's archive, etc. - in developing countries.
I can't fault people for feeling that nobody reads anymore. In the US today the majority of Americans can't even understand books written at a 6th grade level and literacy has been trending downward. Only a small number of us are propping up book sales.
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]
[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.
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.
I think you are describing it pretty well, and I've noticed the same thing. The farther into the future the forecast goes, the higher the probability is that it will look like the historical average.
One thing that I've found to help a lot is to go to weather.gov and look at the "forecast discussion". Often it will help to understand what types of uncertainties exist within the forecast.
It isn't unusual to see notes that make it really clear that 24-48 hour variations are expected, or that massive differences will exist based upon hard to predict variables. "Hey we think it will rain heavily as far south as X, but actually it might end up staying north of Y in which case X will stay dry"
It is easy to see how hard it can be even if the forecast itself turns out to be fairly accurate at a high level.
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.
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.
> 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.
Where is your local source getting their forecast from?
> A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.
* https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/k-12-education/weather-for...
There are also 'technicalities': I'm in Toronto, Canada, which is 40km east-to-east and 20km from the lake to the northern border. If rain hits the western half (around 427/Sherway/Etobicoke) but not the eastern half (Scarborough bluffs), is a "it will rain" forecast correct for the city? Some will perceive it as yes and some as no.
They don’t have to predict the weather for a year. They choose to do something which cannot be done. Certainly not with any known technique, and probably not even in theory.
If I predict that the weather in my location on November 7, 2076 will be moderately cool and sunny (as it is today), I have a pretty good chance of being correct. I wouldn’t find it impressive, though.
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.
FYI your links are about two different publications with similar names (the former is older and not shutting down*).
"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.
According to the "best days" link in the article, November 7th is the best day to cut your hair because the moon phase and zodiac will lead to slower hair growth if you cut it today.
I am amazed this publication made it this far.
To our loyal patrons, we promise to continue this tradition of trustworthiness and authenticity, of being “useful with a pleasant degree of humor,” while producing reliable, genuine content every year.
https://www.almanac.com/old-farmers-almanac-artificial-intel...
I have fond memories of poring over it (or maybe it was the other one, they’re pretty similar) and taking it all in as a kid.
Looking at it with an adult’s eyes, it’s absolute twaddle.
But people go for that sort of thing. How much money gets made on astrology?
I started cutting my hair on the 7th of each month and things have been going really well for me. I won't stop now!
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.
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.
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.
Nota bene, this isn't the Farmer's Almanac everyone's thinking of. You're probably thinking of the Old Farmer's Almanac, which has been in publication since the 1700s and is the oldest continuously published periodical in North America.
I live in Texas and have never seen this Farmer's Almanac in my life. But the Old Farmer's Almanac has been on the store shelves my whole life, and they're still publishing.
Neither is accurate tho. Both are around 50%.
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'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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That's an interesting - and falsifiable - observation.
Quick check: 1984 rates 15103 mentions, 01984 42. So about 0.3%.
For 2015 it is 69000 vs 89 for 02015.
But not all of those are years, there are some other cases in there as well.
That was a synthesized example of how they insert years seemingly for the sake of formatting it weirdly. Now that I’ve pointed it out to you, next time you see this come up, ask yourself if anyone else would have mentioned a date in that context.
If I were them, I might end this comment with “I haven’t seen it done like that since I first got online, in around 01993.”
It's a bit like vegetarians/vegans or people that don't have TV.
It usually gets dropped in the first five minutes of meeting and after that it gets repeated if it is initially ignored.
How many of those are actually (New England) zip codes? (and of the ones that are years, how many of them are "kragen is at it again" :-) Seriously, I've never noticed a thread on these and not found a kragen post as a trigger, but there's probably sampling bias in that - or maybe the intersection of "people who are into the Long Now Foundation" and HN posters is that small?)
> 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.
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
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
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
Ha! Well I am a loser then! I tried to create that suggested name for a new account and it says max 15 chars in a user name
But I could do this one ;-)
Nobody posted [1] yet, it feels like it's needed.
Wow, an organisation worried about dealing with the date flipover in 010000. Very forward thinking
> 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.
> 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.
Unless he's a vampire. Those bastards are very cunning at hiding how long they live for.
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.
Oddly the 2026 cover[1] seems to say that 2026 is a leap year. This seems like the kind of thing that would be their bread and butter to get right.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/2026-Farmers-Amanac-Almanac/dp/192872...
> Best known for its long-range weather predictions
I wonder if a changing climate makes the predictions in the almanac less useful too
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.
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.
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.
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...
Dang. This is one of those annoying cases of finding out something that I would clearly love exists only as it leaves.
I would have subscribed if I knew that the Farmer's Almanac still existed :(
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.
GP did say it was just in reference to whether the winter will be warmer or colder than the last one, which is 50/50
In which case if they're 40% accurate, you can get 60% accuracy from them by assuming it'll be the opposite of what they say
If they could get their accuracy down to 0% you'd have perfect predictions!
They should open source their methodologies, maybe someone else can carry on their work.
It's incredible they've lasted this long.
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
Us
[dead]
[flagged]
Is paper media illegal yet?
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.