Who uses Farmers’ Almanacs? + Zebra finch home design

- Hey, I'm Floor Lixman and you're listening to Science Friday.

“Farmers all the next have been around for hundreds of years.”

You've probably seen them in gas stations or in the grocery store, you know, 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 win your calves. The day that we're recording this, the old farmers all the next says, today's the best day to harvest below ground crops,

set posts, or poor concrete. Now that we're thawing into spring, we wanted to investigate what place do farmers all the next have in modern life and do farmers even use them?

Here to discuss is Dean Regus, a astronomer and farmers all the next contributor, based in Cincinnati and Liz Grazic, organic farmer based in Columbia, Missouri. Thanks for joining us.

- Thank you. - Happy to be here.

“- Liz, as a farmer, do you use the farmers all the next?”

- I love reading the farmers all the next. - For fun tidbits for interesting information, historical things that have happened and the way that just what you said, we should be digging post-supporing concrete.

- I mean, is it for you, is it like the equivalent of how I read Cosmo in the airport? Like, yes, for entertainment. It is, it's for entertainment. It's for me, like learning old wives tales,

which I think are super fun and interesting. But yes, it's for entertainment. - Do you know any farmers to use them as intended? - 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. Interestingly, they're not often wrong.

- Yeah. - But they don't think about things more scientifically-based the way that I think about things. - Dean, you're an astronomer and also a contributor to the farmers all the next.

I have so many questions, but first of all,

what does that mean exactly? - 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 when I was like, yeah, farmers all knack once me write astronomy articles.

I was like, wait, aren't they the people that do farming and astrology? - Yeah. - 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, do they do have a very big astronomy component to this? And I was able to write about, you know, what special events are coming up in the sky, a clip says 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 that's not just the books that's out in the public too. - I mean, what kind of data is the farmers all going to act based on, like is it scientific? - Well, that's a good question. You know, so as an astronomer I do,

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 ones are 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. - There's been some drama recently. There are actually two popular farmers all in X.

There's the farmers all in X. And the old farmers all in X, although both date back over 200 years. The less old farmers all in X was recently in the news because there was an announcement that it was shutting down.

- Dean, I hear you are breaking news for us. What can you tell us? - Well, I was quite a shock when I got a letter from the editor saying, yeah, the farmers all in X 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 that to take it over. And so it's now back in operation. So that's the farm resulmenac that's one with the orange cover versus the old farmers all in X,

which is even older from the late 1700s.

And so it is really amazing that these publications

And I think like Liz said, it's kind of like a throwback.

It is a really kind of quaint, interesting form of entertainment, even for an astronomer like me. We got an email from a livestock farmer Wendy in Iowa. And she said, you know, maybe once a year, I do glance at the farmers all minac in a store.

Not every year. I don't usually refer to it because climate change has made them more obsolete. Liz has climate changed affected your timing or the certainty that you have around when to plant certain folks.

One hundred and eighty percent.

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

And by putting the crops under cover, you have just more control over. It's a little much more control. Yeah, yeah, so much. I'm sure that was a big investment, though.

Massive. Yeah. Massive. Yeah. What resources do you use for planning?

“Is there like a secret farmers all minac that farmers actually do use?”

And is it like no weather data or something? Now that I know it. But I do, I do look at, you know, 10 day, 30 day forecasts. Like many, many times a day. I read weather reports and don't give me wrong.

I do read the farmers all minac. I find it very intriguing. But, you know, I pay very close attention to the weather and and my records, the other farmers records that are in my, yeah, my own records and and other farmers, you know, records that are in my area.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I mean, you know, to me, there's something quite amazing

about any publication that has lasted hundreds of years. You know, through massive changes in technology and media and, you know, 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? Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, I'm a Gen Xer and there is this kind of throwback to this, this nostalgia to it and for getting this book in the mail, like 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 thing, the old farmers all in the back and the farmers all in the back 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 like, we're doing pretty well with astronomy in there. But it is one of those things that we hope that will continue.

That was a astronomer, Dean Regus and Missouri farmer was a great sick. 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 Cyphrite crossover for you. Step aside, Farrow and Ball, zebra finches, have an opinion on that color. Up next, moving from farming to nesting, if you're that person, you know, that person was

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 song birds in the Australian Outback also seem to have favorite colors when it comes to home decorating. Ecologist Lauren Gillette 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.

“Hi, thanks for having me. Did you go in asking to these birds have a favorite color?”

We didn't, but that's, you know, 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, you know, individuals, we have our own preferences, right? 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

and sees everyone around them using another color for their nest, will they conform?

Did we know that zebra finches had a color preference when it came to decorating before this work? So we've been studying this for about 10 to 15 years. No, so we knew that zebra finches had preferences for colors of their nest building material. But we didn't really know

“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 in this 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. How did you know if a finch has a strong preference or a weak preference? Like what do you measure to tell? Okay, this finch doesn't really care about color preference. 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

Salf who was a master student on my team. She and a bunch of other folks would record the amount of time that birds 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, you know, 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, towers with yellow, we would say you have 50, 50. So it was the actual proportion of time that

“you spent interacting with the material. Did all zebrafinches sort of have the same preference?”

Or is it very individualized? The thing that we found is really interesting is that birds have individual color preference. So I think it would be less interesting if every zebrafinch,

you know, just always preferred blue. Because that means there's something else going on. That

just means there's a biological driver, some sensory ecology thing that makes every mouse, like, 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, etc. 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 does this individual variation mean?

And is it important for the animals? What does it mean? 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 sort of parlaze into what they build their nest with. So after we asked 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 zebrafinch pairs that had already built nest.

Sometimes these nests in the colony would match the color that the bird already liked. Other times, this is where it gets really interesting. The nest in the population or the colony would contradict what the focal animal liked. And we would let him watch those birds in those

nests for a few days. And then the critical part is, we let that male and his own partner

build their own nest. So we gave him blue and yellow string. And we asked what colors 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? I love this so much. What did they do?”

So what we found is that whether birds follow the crowd or the colony, dependent 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 in your initial preference, you're like, okay, you know, I'll do whatever one else is doing. I love that. I mean, that makes a lot of sense and feels resonant beyond zebrafinches.

Do birds see color the same way that we do? So they don't. They see color better than we do. So where try chromat, we have three colors. Like humans can see in sort of, you know, very generally blue green and red birds are touch your chromat. 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. You know, we've been talking about

male zebrafinch preference because they're the nest builders. What about females zebrafinches? Do we know anything about their color preferences? Flora, thank you so much for asking that. I'm a

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 we sometimes we measure the females preferences. So, you know, she does have preferences too in

opinion to believe it or not. And what we're doing in our current experiments is we're 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 and the final nest. And we don't have the results fully analyzed yet, but we do have some preliminary data that shows her preferences 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 preferences. Because it's showing up in terms of the nest composition at the end, but we don't know how she's communicating it. We think it might be as simple as, you know, throwing material out of this when she's not happy what she does do, but it could be more than that.

Behind every nest building zebra-finch male, there's a powerful female. That is correct.

I mean, does this study make you just big picture? Make you think differently about bird cognition or zebra-finch culture? So maybe not me because, you know, 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.

“And now 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 pre-existing 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 bird, which is really interesting. It's not just a uniquely human feature. Yeah, that is fascinating. Lauren Gillette is an associate professor of cognitive

ecology at the University of Alberta. Lauren, thanks for joining me today. Thanks so much for having me. That's it for today's show. This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you want to check out us, give us a ring 877 for Cyphrie. That's 877 for Cyphrie. We'll see you next time. I'm Floor Lake tonight.