by The 210th edition of the Farmers’ Almanac reaches the checkout racks this month, which means a locked box in Lewiston, Maine, has already done its work. The winter of 2026 and 2027 is settled and printed: snow, sleet, and surprises, with El Niño shoving the storm track south and the Northeast warned of a tricky mix. Whoever buys the booklet today already knows, in calm little type, what the sky will do in February. Or claims to. It will be read out loud at kitchen tables all winter.
David Young published the first Farmers’ Almanac in 1818, working from a formula of sunspots, the tidal pull of the Moon, and the positions of the planets, and it has passed from forecaster to forecaster ever since. Today’s keeper signs his work Caleb Weatherbee, a pseudonym passed down with the formula itself, which only a handful of people have ever seen. Followers put its accuracy at 80 or 85 percent, a number the publishers repeat the way a family repeats a story about Grandpa: everybody knows it, nobody has checked.
A modern forecast is the whole sky turned into math: satellites, balloons, and ocean buoys feeding numbers into machines that fill rooms. It works. The five-day forecast on your phone comes true about nine times in ten, as accurate as a next-day forecast was in 1980. Then the wall arrives. Small errors in the starting data double every two and a half days, and past roughly two weeks the smartest computers on Earth might as well be dealing off a shuffled deck.
It prints its calendar a year or two in advance. In 1981, two University of Illinois researchers checked five years of the rival book’s monthly forecasts against what the sky did. Temperature calls were right 51 percent of the time, rain and snow calls 52, the same average as a flipped coin. That book runs on the same kind of secret formula and the same 80 percent claim, so the grading travels. Both almanacs grade their own homework, and gently. A region counts as a win if one chosen city lands on the predicted side of normal. Judged purely as a weather instrument, has the Farmers’ Almanac outlived its usefulness? Yes, and by generations. Its own editors seem to know it. Read the fine print of this year’s outlook and the 1818 formula now gets help from satellite observations, computer models, and NOAA’s ocean data.
But being useful and being right are two different things, and here the old book refuses to die, because the forecast was never the whole of it. The almanac is planting tables and fishing days, recipes and riddles, a tide of small black moons. Some families keep both almanacs and argue about them like ball teams. Since 1919 the book has come with a hole factory-drilled in the upper corner, a courtesy to readers who spent two centuries hanging it on a nail in the barn, the kitchen, the privy. People kept it where people keep company.
Punxsutawney has been hoisting its groundhog since 1887. NOAA grades the rodents with a straight face. Over the past twenty years Phil runs 35 percent, seventeenth of nineteen, behind a prairie dog statue, one groundhog that has never been seen, and three stuffed groundhogs, one named Schnogadahl Sammi. Nobody writes angry letters. The shadow is a reason to stand in the February cold with your neighbors, chanting at a rodent until spring feels possible.
In August 1930 the Sunday Express wanted a fresh angle on a royal birth. Cheiro, the famous astrologer, was busy, so his assistant, R. H. Naylor, cast the newborn Princess Margaret’s chart and predicted an eventful life, the safest bet in the business. Readers demanded more. Weeks later Naylor warned that a British aircraft would be in danger between October 8 and 15. When the R101 fell in flames on October 5, days ahead of the window, the near miss made him famous. The daily horoscope has survived every test it ever failed, because it answers a different hunger: one sentence a day telling a stranger the universe has noticed them.
Even Wall Street, which sells itself as the most rational room on Earth, keeps a rabbit’s foot on the desk. In 1978 a New York Times sportswriter named Leonard Koppett built the Super Bowl indicator as a spoof, mocking the itch to find patterns where none exist: if an old NFL team won, stocks would rise; if an old AFL team won, stocks would fall. At the time, eleven of the twelve Super Bowls ever played lined up with the market, and the rate across the first twenty-two hit 91 percent. The spoof graduated into textbooks. Koppett lived long enough to marvel that his joke had hardened into a statistic quoted without a smile. It is leaving now, slowly: since 2005 it has been right about 40 percent of the time, the magic decayed back into the coin flip it always was. Sell in May. As goes January, so goes the year. Markets, like winters, are places where the stakes are high and the answers are scarce, and that is where lucky charms breed.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the older rival, tells the story on itself. In 1942 the FBI caught a German spy on a train into Penn Station, ashore from a U-boat onto Long Island only the night before, that year’s edition in his coat pocket. Washington worried aloud that the enemy was reading our weather. Robb Sagendorph, the book’s eleventh editor, always suspected the spy wanted the tide tables. “Then again,” he would add, “maybe it was the forecasts. After all, the Germans went on to lose the war.”
As prophecy, the almanac stopped being useful a long time ago. It refuses to die because the prophecy was the excuse. What it sells, what the groundhog and the horoscope and the stock market charm sell, is the oldest comfort in the catalog: winter will come, and winter will end, and someone has written it down in advance. Nobody reads a phone forecast out loud at the kitchen table. Buy the new edition if you like. Hang it by the back door, where the hole has waited for the nail since 1919. The phone can tell you about the rain. The nail holds the older news, and the older news has never once been wrong: the seasons are still coming, right on schedule, the way they have since 1818.
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