An Obituary for Farmers’ Almanac |
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By Greta Rainbow |
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It is possible to stop a wound from hemorrhaging by applying a mixture of water and the oil that collects in a tobacco pipe stem. The highest peak in “Indian Territory” is Sugarloaf Mountain, at 2,600 feet. A cupful of strong coffee will remove the odor of onions from the breath. When the temperature falls suddenly, there is a storm forming south of you. |
Did you know any of these critical facts about the world and how to survive it? No, you wouldn’t, not without consulting Farmers’ Almanac from 1908, as I have done, thus becoming a dilettante of largely obsolete items of information whose original accuracy or use case is not always clear. |
Farmers’ Almanac has published annually since 1818 — through the Civil War, the Great Depression, the invasion of Iraq, the launch of OpenAI, and everything else that’s happened with this country in 208 years. It is your “Your #1 Guide to the Good Life.” In addition to kooky aphorisms and allegories, the publication traffics in long-range weather predictions (though some researchers have cast doubt on their accuracy), gardening tips, and other practical knowledge. It, along with its rival the Old Farmer’s Almanac, carried the almanac tradition in North America into the 21st century. But the long run has come to an end. |
On November 6, Farmers’ Almanac’s four-person editorial team based in Lewiston, Maine announced that the 2026 almanac would be their last. “This decision, though difficult, reflects the growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the Almanac in today’s chaotic media environment,” wrote Editor Sandi Duncan and Editor Emeritus Peter Geiger in a statement. |
Duncan and Geiger did not respond to Study Hall’s multiple requests for comment. |
 | Source: Internet Archive |
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Farmers’ Almanac is far from the only publication calling it quits. But a fallen almanac represents the loss of an ancient type of media. Almanacs were all the rage in the newly established 13 colonies. Before that, in ancient Babylon, astronomers used almanacs to list which activities were favorable or not for every day of the year. Farewell to the Farmers’ Almanac means another nail in the coffin of slow media, the memory of an un-optimized life buried with it. |
When Farmers’ Almanac announced the discontinuation, their social media comments sections saw an outpouring of emotion. (Lest millennials and zoomers forget, Facebook is alive and well.) “This is really sad news,” wrote Debby Vaughn of Morrison, Illinois. “I know so many things are changing, but you were always there.” Melanie Edman-Osmer of Grizzly Flats, California asked, “Isn’t this one of the signs of the Apocalypse?” Tellingly, some commenters were speaking of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which, by the way, currently boasts a circulation of over 2.5 million print copies. The Farmers’ Almanac had a distribution of over 510,000 when it closed. |
It seemed from the comments that fans were mourning the loss of what the Farmers’ Almanac symbolized as much as the information contained inside. They missed an object that still seemed to represent a myth of “salt of the earth” Americana. |
Charlotte Ferguson, a Maine-based restaurant worker turned farmer turned carpenter who sometimes read Farmers’ Almanac, said she would flip through an almanac to connect with the communal lore around farming. A favorite factoid that she picked up from Farmers’ Almanac is that you can gauge the harshness of the coming winter by the thickness of the woolly mammoth caterpillars’ stripes. “It’s not like I was sitting there reading the publication and being like, ‘Alright, this is what I can expect in 2026,’” Ferguson told me. “I used it more like a connection to past farmers and the lived experience we all share, doing the same tasks at the same time every year.” |
Farmers’ Almanac tried to adapt to the digital age. In 2018, they added skyscrapers to the background of their illustrated cover featuring a weathervane-topped barn. In addition, they offered digital versions of the almanac, made social media accounts, and posted online-exclusive blogs, allowing them to occasionally respond to weather news in a more timely manner than the print version’s 16-month lead time. |
While its embrace of social media and web are relatively new, many aspects of Farmers’ Almanac were consistent across decades. A forecaster using the pseudonym “Caleb Weatherbee” provided weather predictions dating back to the publication’s founding, using a secret formula reliant on the tides, planetary positions, and sunspots. There was “something special in the stars,” said Duncan of the appointment of the most recent Caleb Weatherbee in 2014. |
In my reporting, I found claims on several forums and heard suspicions from sources that Farmers’ Almanac ran AI-generated images alongside online articles in the last few years, following ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022. While unconfirmed, there’s little doubt the publication abused the internet’s wealth of open-source stock images. I’m a fan of the lo-fi, messy, Web2-inflected blog aesthetic as much as the next nostalgic, but the publication’s site was not a pleasant place to be. Casserole recipes with fun tidbits about the post-war housewife were smashed between a broken page for a Chinese New Year superstitions listicle. (The site’s content is now inaccessible, redirecting back to Duncan and Geiger’s farewell message.) What feels kitsch in a print publication becomes clutter on the internet. |
The purpose of the almanac is to synthesize the information and store it in one place. Perhaps more than anything, its utility is its physicality. The hole in the top left corner of the some 200-page print version is proof that it’s meant to hang in a tool shed somewhere, to be consulted as needed. Says Laura Larkin in an Amazon customer review for the 2019 edition, “I was a little surprised that this years had a hole drilled thru it by the spine. It reminded me of the ever popular Sears catalog with just such a hole so you could hang it handily in your ‘outside reading room’ before indoor plumbing became so widespread!” Five stars. The 2026 edition of Farmers’ Almanac is currently sold out and on back order. |
At least one editor thinks Farmers’ Almanac had — or still has — the potential to successfully reinvent itself for the modern age by shifting the editorial content. Mike Rogge, who revived the free-spirited outdoors magazine Mountain Gazette five years ago, after it went dark in the 1970s, told Study Hall that when it comes to legacy media, “it’s not the title that gets old, it’s the leadership.” |
“I mean, how popular is urban farming right now? There are so many ways that Farmers’ Almanac could have kept the format but tailored the editorial to a new generation,” said Rogge, whose magazine shared a printer with Farmers’ Almanac. He added that depending on the state of ownership, he could see new leadership reviving the publication in the future. |
The Other Almanac, which launched in 2022 and is compiled and edited by New York City-based artist Ana Ratner, is an example of how the centuries old almanac tradition can be imbued with modern sensibilities. |
 | Source: Internet Archive |
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“I am sad that the Farmers’ Almanac is shutting down, even though it’s a sort of useless publication and is, to me, still a tool of colonization,” said Ratner. She argued that historically almanacs were by and for men who wielded unevenly distributed power — see Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack and Franklin’s financial windfall from the slave trade. Ratner was a “nerdy, nature-oriented kid” fascinated by the Old Farmer’s Almanac in the supermarket checkout aisle. But when she tried reading an issue as an adult, she found little of substance in the pages and its advice and content disappointingly apolitical. “[The existing almanacs] are really general. They’re like, ‘Whales are good!’ Okay, but what is happening to them? And why? And what have we done to decrease their population?’” |
Ratner dreamed up a version that had “the silliness, the colorfulness, and the chaotic energy” but also spoke to the realities of nature and ecology right now. Thus The Other Almanac was born: a New York City-specific, full-bleed marvel which has featured an ode to cows by writer Sabrina Imbler, maps of community fridge locations, and a Bronx Zoo animal zodiac. “If more people are making almanacs, it’s bringing back this vibrant competition between them,” Ratner said. “I don’t think of The Other Almanac as being similar or replacing original almanacs, but it is adding to the canon.” |
As an urban publication, The Other Almanac also confronts an important demographic shift. These days, the vast majority of American readers are not rural agriculture workers, the original intended audience of the Farmers’ Almanac and the Old Farmers Almanac. Another city-based upstart is Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac out of New Orleans, whose highlights include a primer on bathtub insulin from a “prediabetic, off-grid herbalist dropout” and the advice column “Landless & Jaded.” |
The greatest legacy of Farmers’ Almanac might be its tether to another way of understanding ourselves and the world, one dictated by the laws of nature rather than the laws of market-minded mankind. A reading experience defined by cramped serif text and a flip-flop between esoteric content and brick-and-mortar business ads is trippy compared to the reigning analytical prediction mode of the moment — that is, bot-generated feed waste. Meanwhile, the most recent issue of Farmers’ Almanac includes a woodcut diagram called “The Man of the Signs,” which outlines how each zodiac sign governs a specific part of the body, and that blood flows strongly through that body part when the moon is in the corresponding sign (so be careful with your heart during Leo season). It might be crackpot, but it’s simpler than cherry picking from the millions of horoscope forums or AI-generated Co-Star notifications until we’re satisfied with our constructed fate. |
The spirit of Farmers’ Almanac might not align with an optimized life because it never strayed too far from regurgitating how earlier peoples interpreted the movements of the sky, ground, and sea. |
“Farming introduced this cyclical thought within me. It’s a beautiful dance of planning, and putting in, and pulling out, and replenishing,” said Charlotte Ferguson. “It’s not a clock. You’re controlled by the weather and by the sun. That’s really it.” |
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ICYMI: Interview with Brian Reed |
On the latest podcast episode, Brian Reed, a host and producer of Question Everything, discussed why he’s advocating for Section 230 reform. In this discussion, Reed shares why he believes big tech platforms need to be held accountable for disinformation and his reporting on information ecosystems. |
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