Who uses Farmers’ Almanacs? + Zebra finch home design

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, I’m Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday. Farmers’ Almanacs have been around for hundreds of years. You’ve probably seen them in gas stations or in the grocery store. There are these books with yellow or orange covers with old-timey illustrations, and they’re filled with very detailed directives about things like the best time to plant certain crops or when to wean your calves.

The day that we’re recording this, the old Farmers’ Almanac says today is the best day to harvest belowground crops, set posts, or pour concrete. Now that we’re thawing into spring, we wanted to investigate, what place do farmers almanacs have in modern life? And do farmers even use them?

Here to discuss is Dean Regas, astronomer and Farmers’ Almanac contributor based in Cincinnati, and Liz Graznak, organic farmer based in Columbia, Missouri. Thanks for joining us.

DEAN REGAS: Thank you.

LIZ GRAZNAK: Happy to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Liz, as a farmer, do you use the Farmers’ Almanac?

LIZ GRAZNAK: I love reading the Farmer’s Almanac for fun tidbits, for interesting information, historical things that have happened and the way that, just what you said, we should be digging posts and pouring concrete.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, is it for you? Is it the equivalent of how I read Cosmo in the airport? For entertainment?

LIZ GRAZNAK: Yes, absolutely, it is. It’s for entertainment. It’s for me learning old wives’ tales, which I think are super fun and interesting. But yes, it’s for entertainment.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you any farmers who use them as intended?

LIZ GRAZNAK: No, no, I don’t. My old neighbors that I’m very close with, they read them. But these are “70 plus year old” farmers that look at the world a little differently than I do. And they actually make a lot of decisions based on what I call old wives’ tales.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Interestingly, they’re not often wrong.

LIZ GRAZNAK: Yeah, but they don’t think about things more scientifically based the way that I think about things.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dean, you’re an astronomer and also a contributor to the Farmers’ Almanac. I have so many questions. But first of all, what does that mean, exactly?

DEAN REGAS: Well, a couple of years ago or a number of years ago, they approached me to write astronomy articles for them. And I have to be honest, I was like, yeah, Farmer’s Almanac wants me to write astronomy articles. I was like, wait, aren’t they the people that do farming and astrology? And so I was a little skeptical in the beginning.

I was thinking like, wait, what am I going to be contributing to? And then I got on board because I was like, they do have a very big astronomy component to this. And I was able to write about what special events are coming up in the sky, eclipses, meteor showers.

And what I found is that their response has been really great for astronomy content, and especially online as well. They have over a million followers on social media. And so it’s not just the books. It’s out in the public too.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, what kind of data is the Farmers’ Almanac based on? Is it scientific?

DEAN REGAS: Well, that’s a good question. So as an astronomer, I’m an amateur weather person as well. And I’m reading what the spring forecast is for the Ohio Valley. And I’m on the border of dry and wet and warm and dry. So I’m like, which one’s it going to be?

And they do say that they’re right more than half the time. So for weather, it’s hard to say. For astronomy, at least, I was able to hopefully bring some certainty of what they can look up and see in the sky.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hmm, there’s been some drama recently. There are actually two popular Farmers’ Almanacs. There’s the Farmers’ Almanac and the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Although, both date back over 200 years.

The less old Farmers’ Almanac was recently in the news because there was an announcement that it was shutting down. Dean, I hear you have breaking news for us. What can you tell us?

DEAN REGAS: Well, that was quite a shock when I got a letter from the editor saying, yeah, the Farmers’ Almanac was going to shut down. This was the one that started in 1818. So it’s been around over 200 years. And so the family that was running it just kind of thought, well, it’s time to get out of the business, and they’ve been doing it for so long.

And so it looked like it was going to shut down completely. And then just earlier this year, another company formed to take it over. And so it’s now back in operation. So that’s the Farmers’ Almanac. That’s the one with the orange cover versus the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is even older from the late 1700s.

And so it is really amazing that these publications have been going for so long. And I think, Liz said, it’s a throwback. It is a really quaint, interesting form of entertainment, even for an astronomer like me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We got an email from a livestock farmer, Wendy, in Iowa, and she said, maybe once a year, I do glance at the Farmers’ Almanac in a store, not every year. I don’t usually refer to it because climate change has made them more obsolete. Liz, has climate change affected your timing or the certainty that you have around when to plant certain things?

LIZ GRAZNAK: Oh, 180%? Yes, absolutely. My whole farm now has been built and expanded using high tunnels and growing under cover because of the fact that I need to depend on the crops that I grow. So, yeah, climate change is super real.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And by putting the crops under cover have just more control over–

LIZ GRAZNAK: So much more control. Yeah, so much.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m sure that was a big investment, though.

LIZ GRAZNAK: Massive, yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Massive. What resources do you use for planning? Is there a secret Farmers’ Almanac that farmers actually do use? And is it like NOAA weather data or something?

LIZ GRAZNAK: Not that I know of, but I do look at 10-day, 30-day forecasts many, many times a day. I read weather reports. And don’t get me wrong, I do read the Farmers’ Almanac. I find it very intriguing. But I pay very close attention to the weather and my records and other farmers’ records that are in– Yeah, my own records and other farmers’ records that are in my area.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, to me, there’s something quite amazing about any publication that has lasted hundreds of years through massive changes in technology and media and data collection. Do you think that part of this is like, we love to have a physical book, that we like to touch things, and we don’t get as much of that anymore? What’s your thought on that, Dean?

DEAN REGAS: Yeah, absolutely. I think that I’m a Gen Xer, and there is this throwback to this nostalgia to it. And for getting this book in the mail– so I contributed to the 2026 printed copy, writing about comets.

And getting that in the mail and flipping through it is really special. It’s something that’s very unique, and I think having that physical copy is really important. And the fact that there’s two of these type of things, the Old Farmer’s Almanac and the Farmers’ Almanac that are out there, both with this really robust astronomy portion to it because I have friends and colleagues that write for the other one, so we’re doing pretty well with astronomy in there. But it is one of those things that we hope that will continue.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That was astronomer Dean Regas and Missouri farmer Liz Graznak. We have to take a break, but don’t go away because we’re moving from farming to nesting. And we’ve got just the HGTV sci-fi crossover for you. Step aside, Farrow & Ball, zebra finches have an opinion on that color.

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Up next, moving from farming to nesting, if you’re that person, that person with strong feelings about home decorating colors, I’m looking at you, obsessive paint color people. Well, guess what, you’re not alone. Researchers found that, get this, zebra finches, little songbirds in the Australian Outback, also seem to have favorite colors when it comes to home decorating.

Ecologist Lauren Guillette from the University of Alberta has studied zebra finches for over a decade and is author on this new study. Lauren, welcome to Science Friday.

LAUREN GUILLETTE: Hi, thanks for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Did you go in asking, do these birds have a favorite color?

LAUREN GUILLETTE: We didn’t, but that’s a really exciting finding. So what we actually wanted to know was whether animals follow the crowd or whether their own opinions can override the social pressure that surround them in their community. And so one thing that people seem to often assume is that humans, including animals, just follow the crowd.

But as you said, individuals, we have our own preferences. You have your own favorite color. I have my own favorite color. So we wanted to know what happened when these two things collide, so your own individual preferences or biases and the world around you. So the question we asked is, if a bird prefers one color and sees everyone around them using another color for their nest will, they conform?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Did we know that zebra finches had a color preference when it came to decorating before this work?

LAUREN GUILLETTE: So we’ve been studying this for about 10 to 15 years now. So we knew that zebra finches had preferences for colors of their nest-building material, but we didn’t really what that color preference meant or if it was important at all. So that’s what we found in this study. So in our laboratory, when male zebra finches build the nest– so they’re the sex and the species that collect and deposit all the material into the nest– they often have shown us that they have strong preferences for particular colors of string.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How did if a finch has a strong preference or a weak preference? What do you measure to tell, OK, this finch doesn’t really care about color preference?

LAUREN GUILLETTE: Yeah, that’s a great question. So what does it look like in our lab to measure color preferences? Well, we put a male and a female in a cage together, and we give them, in this case, blue string and yellow string. And that string in the initial preference test is tied down so the birds can interact with it, but they can’t take it away and build a nest with it.

And we just video record them. In this case, it happened to be for four hours. And then we have people on our team score the behavior of the animals. In this case, it was Julia Self who was a master’s student on my team.

She and a bunch of other folks would record the amount of time that bird spent interacting with the different colors of string. So from this measurement, we could get two things. One thing was, which color do you prefer? so blue or yellow.

Preference strength, which is what you asked about, is the proportion of time that the bird spent interacting with one color. So if you spent the entire time interacting with blue, you would have a preference strength of 100. Or if you spent two hours of blue, two hours with yellow, we would say you have 50/50. So it was the actual proportion of time that you spent interacting with the material.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Did all zebra finches have the same preference? Or is it very individualized?

LAUREN GUILLETTE: The thing that we found that is really interesting is that birds have individual color preference. So I think it would be less interesting if every zebra finch just always preferred blue because that means there’s something else going on. That just means there’s a biological drive or some sensory ecology thing that makes every male select a certain color.

But what we found is that birds have different color preferences. So in this study, we used blue and yellow. But in the past, we’ve used other gorgeous colors like pink, orange, purple, et cetera, and birds prefer different colors.

And it’s not always the same color. So there’s this individual variation, and we wanted to know, what is this individual variation mean? And is it important for the animals?

FLORA LICHTMAN: What does it mean?

LAUREN GUILLETTE: So we’re not sure what it means, but we know that it has effects on how they filter information from the environment. And that parlays into what they build their nest with. So after we ask the birds what their favorite color was in this experiment, we then introduced that male and his female partner into a small colony.

And this small colony had a bunch of other zebra finch pairs that had already built nests. Sometimes these nests in the colony would match the color that the bird already liked. Other times, and this is where it gets really interesting, the nests in the population or the colony would contradict what the focal animal liked.

And we would let him watch those birds and those nests for a few days. And then the critical part is we let that male and his own partner build their own nests. So we gave him blue and yellow string.

And we asked, what color do you build with? Do you build with the color that you initially preferred? Or do you conform to what the other birds in the population are doing and copy them?

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love this so much. What did they do.

LAUREN GUILLETTE: So what we found is that whether birds followed the crowd or the colony depended on how strong that male’s initial preference was. So birds with weak preferences were more likely to conform to the majority and build with the color that everyone else was using. So if you were 50/50 and your initial preference, you’re like, OK, I’ll do what everyone else is doing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love that. I mean, that makes a lot of sense and feels resonant beyond zebra finches. Do birds see color the same way that we do?

LAUREN GUILLETTE: So they don’t. They see color better than we do, so we’re trichromats. We have three colors– humans can see in, very generally, blue, green, and red. Birds are tetrachromats, so they can see the blue, green, and red that humans can see, but they can also see into the ultraviolet. So we think this means they have actually better color vision than us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We’ve been talking about male zebra finch preference because they’re the nest builders. What about female zebra finches? Do we know anything about their color preferences?

LAUREN GUILLETTE: Flora, thank you so much for asking that. I’m a feminist, and so are lots of the folks on my team. And it’s really been bothering me that we’ve only been asking questions about male behavior for such a long time.

And there was a practical reason for doing this, because the males are the ones who select and deposit the material. But what we’ve been doing recently, it wasn’t part of this paper that I’m talking about today, but we’ve been beginning to study the role that the female might have. And so what we do is sometimes we measure the female’s preferences. So she does have preferences too and opinions, believe it or not. And what we’re doing–

FLORA LICHTMAN: I believe it.

LAUREN GUILLETTE: And what we’re doing in our current experiments is were asking, we know that these biases are important for the male and that if he has a strong bias, he doesn’t conform to what the group is doing. But what about the female? So we’re running some really interesting experiments now where we’re paying attention to the female. We’re asking her what she likes, and then we’re asking, how does her preference show up in the final nest?

And we don’t have the results fully analyzed yet, but we do have some preliminary data that shows her preference is showing up in the final nest even though she’s not selecting the material. So what we’re taking a lot of time to do now is look at these videos and try to figure out how she’s communicating to the male what her preference is because it’s showing up in terms of the nest composition at the end, but we don’t how she’s communicating it. We think it might be as simple as throwing material out of the nest when she’s not happy, which she does do. But it could be more than that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Behind every nest-building zebra finch male, there’s a powerful female.

LAUREN GUILLETTE: That is correct.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, does this study make you– just big picture, make you think differently about bird cognition or zebra finch culture?

LAUREN GUILLETTE: So maybe not me because this is what I set out to test. But other people, when I tell them what I do, seem really surprised about this. So one of the takeaways that we have from the study is that strong opinion matters, even in birds.

I think we have lots of evidence that strong opinions matter for humans, especially if we think about politics and how polarized things are. If two people get the same information, they filter it differently depending on what their preexisting biases are. And it seems that our birds are doing something very similar. So this idea of culture, how information spreads through populations in humans, also seems to be there in birds, which is really interesting. It’s not just a uniquely human feature.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, that is fascinating. Lauren Gullette is an associate professor of cognitive ecology at the University of Alberta. Lauren, thanks for joining me today.

LAUREN GUILLETTE: Thanks so much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s it for today’s show. This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you want to chirp at us, give us a ring 877-4-SCIFRI. That’s 877-4-SCIFRI. We’ll see you next time. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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