So Long, Old Friend

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

Before we say goodbye, we should probably say its name correctly.

It’s The Farmers’ Almanac, with the apostrophe after the s. Not The Farmer’s Almanac, as though it belonged to a single fellow who kept it on the dash of his pickup. 

And not The Old Farmer’s Almanac, either, which, by grammatical law, belongs to one lone, old and mysterious farmer. No disrespect… that one’s never been an outcast exactly, but it’s also never quite been regarded as blood kin at the reunion, if you know what I mean. Kind of like The Second Baptist Church of… You know it exists. You’re glad it’s doing well. But it’s not who you think of first.

Down here, at least in my memory, it was always The Farmers’ Almanac, commonly known as “The Almanac”. Belonging to all farmers. Shared wisdom. Passed hands. Dog-eared. Smelling faintly of hay, coffee, and axle grease.

It wasn’t just a book. It was a companion.

It sat on kitchen counters and tractor seats. It rode in glove boxes and lived in back pockets. It was filled with planting advice, folk inventions, small stories, odd facts, and the kind of lived-in knowledge you couldn’t Google because other than a Foxfire book, nobody had ever bothered to write it down anywhere else. (Take that, internet.)

And then there was the weather.

Not a five-day forecast. Not radar loops and color-coded maps made by AI modeling software. Sorry, Glenn Burns, but The Almanac was playing a longer game. And a pretty accurate one, at that. Rainfall. Temperatures. Tides. Sunrise and sunset. All stitched together with lunar cycles, celestial patterns, and what folks simply called the signs.

My father-in-law still plants by the signs, to this day. And I can’t count the number of times I watched my grandpa flip through his Almanac before putting seed in the ground, or before dressing an animal. It wasn’t superstition. It was tradition backed by observation, repetition, and survival.

And now we’re told it’s ending.

The 2026 edition will be the last printed Farmers’ Almanac. They say the website access ends December 1, though as of this writing, it’s still alive and kicking, like an old farmer who hasn’t quite agreed to retire yet.

Why is it going away? Money. Of course.

Frankly, it’s hard to see how any publication survives these days. When I was a kid, The Jackson Herald cost a quarter. A copy of Popular Mechanics was a dollar. But these days, a magazine costs about what a whole book used to, and sometimes more. The math just doesn’t work the way it once did.

Still, it hurts.

Here in the South, we know the pain of letting go. Mostly because we don’t. We don’t throw things away. We keep them. We stack them. We store them “just in case.” Especially something that’s been woven into our lives for over two centuries.

The Farmers’ Almanac wasn’t just information. It was continuity. It was a quiet agreement between generations that the world still ran on rhythms worth noticing.

We’ll survive without it. Farmers always do. Folks adapt. They learn new tools. They keep planting anyway.

But even so, we pause. We nod our heads. We feel a catch in our throats.

Farewell, Farmers’ Almanac. You belonged to all of us.

And 200 years wasn’t nearly long enough.