If you are looking for some good news as a brutally cold February draws to a close in Saskatchewan, Jeff Woodward is predicting a warm start to March.
Mind you, Woodward uses pig spleens for his weather prognostication.
Woodward’s unusual method of predicting the weather goes back generations to his ancestors in Sweden. When they would butcher a hog at the start of the winter, they would notice that the amount of fat deposits on the spleen would differ, indicating the nature of the winter the hog was preparing for.
“It’s an old tradition that has been passed down from my ancestors from Scandinavia. I think it was probably fairly common several hundred years ago when they were preparing for the winter, that they would slaughter a pig or an animal and then they would observe things on the animal that they would interpret as indicating what the weather would be like,” Woodward said. “You look at the fat content and see how much reserve was being put away for the winter, meaning it might be colder than normal… that kind of thing.”
It might have held more significance in Sweden hundreds of years ago, but Woodward said that his ancestors carried on the tradition when they settled in southwest Saskatchewan.
“My great-grandfather and then my grandfather did more in a sort of joking way,” Woodward said. “They would slaughter a pig and the neighbours would come over and there would be lots of good Scandinavian folk would come over and they’d do this without much intent or belief.
“It evolved over time and it became a routine or ritual that they would do each fall.”
Woodward’s uncle, Gus Wickstrom, was fascinated by the ritual as a kid and when he retired from farming took up the practice and gained a lot of attention in the process.
“He did it with some zest,” Woodward said. “He made some predictions that were relatively outlandish and they came true. He predicted a snowfall in June and some significant weather events that came true. He got a lot of notoriety for that. He became kind of famous — and quite broadly, he was on The Daily Show and a number of television shows — and then he passed away in 2007. I’ve been doing it ever since.”
The “pig spleen prognostication centre” is in Tompkins, where Wickstrom lived, and that is where Woodward gets his pig spleens each year. There was a party at the Artesian in Regina in early December to unveil the 2019 predictions which run from January until the end of June.
“For January, the prediction was pretty good. The weather was predicted properly. It was a warmer than average January and there was a rain event that I predicted and that actually happened,” Woodward said. “February was not so good. The prediction was that it would start off cool, but that we would rebound around February 11th and we really haven’t. It’s been cold the entire month. I could probably claim some accuracy in some of the snow events, but the temperature prediction was not as accurate.”
Overall Woodward predicted a warmer winter with a lot of snow. The snowfall has been there, but the historically cold February is working against his track record.
“In general I said a little warmer than average winter, more snow than average and a significantly dry May and a wet June,” he said. “So far, we’ve had a very, very cold last month and I’m really hoping that we warm up significantly to get back to that originally prediction.”
Don’t we all, Jeff.
After a mild start to March, Woodward is predicting a mid-month cold snap, with warm weather staying for good on Mar. 24. He sees the end of March and all of April to be above seasonal.
Woodward said there’s no secret to the process — it’s outlined in the Farmer’s Almanac — and that while he appreciates that it’s an odd and funny thing to do he still feels that there is something to it, though he isn’t sure he can really describe what it actually is.
He believes that there are three distinct reactions when people learn about pig spleen prognostication:
“One group believes in this whole-heartedly. They will actually plan the winter based on the pig spleen forecast. There’s people who think it’s interesting and that it might have some merit, but they don’t know why they should believe in it or like it,” Woodward said. “And then there’s people who say it’s a whole bunch of hog wash. Pardon the pun.”
