Science Friday
Hosted by Flora Lichtman and Ira Flatow
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Have climate change and weather apps made Farmers' Almanacs obsolete? Plus, home decorating tips from zebra finches.
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Hey, I'm Flor Lixman, 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. You know, they're 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 farmer's almanac says, "Today is the best day to harvest below-ground 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 Rigas, astronomer and farmers' almanac contributor, based in Cincinnati, and Liz Grazeck, organic farmer based in Columbia, Missouri. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
Happy to be here.
Liz, as a farmer, do you use the farmer's almanac?
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.
I mean, is it for you, is it like the equivalent of how I read Cosmo in the airport?
Yes, absolutely. 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 who use them, you know, as intended?
No, no, I don't. My old neighbors that I'm very close with, they read them. But you know, 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.
Hmm.
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 Farmer's Almanac. 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, 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, uh, 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, you know, 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 that's not just the books. It's out in the public too.
I mean, what kind of data is the Farmer's Almanac based on? Like, is it scientific?
Well, that's a good question. Uh, you know, so as an astronomer, I do, uh, I'm an amateur weather, uh, 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, uh, warm and, uh, dry. So I'm like, well, which one's it going to be? Uh, and they do say that they're right more than half the time. So, uh, so for weather, it's, it's hard to say. For astronomy, at least I was able to hopefully bring some certainty of, uh, what they can look up and see in the sky.
Hmm. There's been some drama recently. There are actually two popular Farmer's Almanacs. There's the Farmer's Almanac and the old Farmer's Almanac, although both date back over 200 years.
The Less Old Farmer's 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?
Well, it was quite a shock when I got a letter from the editor saying, yeah, the Farmer's 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, 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 Farmer's 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,
these publications have been going for so long. And I, I think, like Liz said, it's, 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 Farmer's 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?
180%. Yes, absolutely. My whole farm now has been built and expanded using high tunnels and, and growing undercover 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 undercover, you have just more control over the conditions?
So much more control.
Yeah, so much.
I'm sure that was a big investment, though.
Massive.
Yeah. Massive.
What resources do you use for planting? Is there like a secret Farmer's Almanac that farmers actually do use? And is it like NOAA weather data or something?
Now that I know of, but I do, I do look at, um, you know, 10 day, 30 day forecasts, like many, many times a day. I read weather reports and don't get me wrong. I do read the Farmer's Almanac. I, I find it very intriguing, but you know, I pay very close attention to the weather and, and my records and 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, uh, you know, I'm, I'm a Gen Xer and, uh, there is this kind of throwback to this, this nostalgia to it. And for getting this book in the mail, like, uh, so I contributed to the 2026, uh, printed copy, writing about comets and getting that in the mail and, and flipping through it is really special. It's, 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, uh, type of thing, the old Farmer's Almanac and the Farmer's Almanac that are out there, both with this really robust astronomy portion, portion to it, because I have a lot of friends and colleagues that write for the other one. So we're like, uh, we're doing pretty well
with astronomy in there. Uh, but, uh, it is one of those things that we hope that will continue.
That was astronomer Dean Rigas and Missouri farmer Liz Grasek. 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-Fry crossover for you. Step aside Pharaoh and 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, you know, 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 Galette 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, do 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 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?
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 now. 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 Self, who is a master's 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, you know, the entire time interacting with blue, you would have a preference strength of 100. Or if you spent, you know, two hours with 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.
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 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 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 parlay's 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 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 in 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?
I love this so much. What did they do?
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 in your initial preference, you're like, OK, you know, I'll do what everyone else is doing.
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?
So they don't. They see color better than we do. So we're trichromat. We have three colors. We, like, humans can see, and sort of, you know, very generally, blue, green, and red. Birds are tetrachromat, 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.
Now, 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?
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, you know, 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 was a 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 female's preferences. So, you know, she does have preferences too and opinions, believe it or not.
I believe it.
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 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 know how she's communicating it. We think it might be as simple as, you know, throwing material out of the nest when she's not happy, which she does do, but it could be more than that.
Behind every nest building zebra finch male, there's a powerful female.
That's correct.
That's what we always say. 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. You know, 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.
Yeah, that is fascinating. Lauren Galette 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 chirp at us, give us a ring, 8774-SY-FRY. That's 8774-SY-FRY. We'll see you next time. I'm Flora Lipton.
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