The fat on a pig’s spleen can identify if cold weather may be in the forecast
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Between countless apps and the Old Farmer’s Almanac, producers have no shortage of tools for weather prediction.
But one man’s family taught him to use a pig’s spleen for this task.
Jeff Woodward, an engineer with Environment and Climate Change Canada, learned the craft from Gus Wickstrom, Woodward’s late uncle who farmed in Tompkins, Sask.
Woodward’s European ancestors butchered a pig in the fall and used clues on the spleen to determine the kind of weather Mother Nature had in store.
Farmers looked at both the spleen’s thickness and the ridge of fat that runs down the centre of the spleen.
“If you look at that (ridge), how big it is and different sort of deposits on it, you can actually create a graph,” Woodward told Calgary Eyeopener yesterday. “You divide the spleen up into six parts (which represent six months) from January to June.”
The top of the spleen shows the current month and the bottom indicates the end of the six-month period. A thickening of the spleen could indicate the pig ate more to prepare for colder temperatures.
The spleen could be used to predict weather for about a 200-km radius from the pig’s home farm, Woodward said.
While he’s had some success predicting weather with this tool, his uncle became a celebrity for the art, Woodward added.
“When (Wickstrom) retired from farming, he took it up with great vigour,” Woodward told Calgary Eyeopener. “He started doing predictions for people in the U.S. They would actually send him spleens from different spots in the U.S.”
Woodward posts his forecasts on the Facebook page Pig Spleen Weather Prognostication.
He predicts the end of April will see above average precipitation, and May to start out colder than normal.
Farms.com has reached out to Woodward for more insight into his prediction methods.