(File photo/paNOW Staff)

By Alison Sandstrom

Bundle up

‘Something we have not experienced in years’: pig spleen prognostic calls for harsh winter

Nov 17, 2020 | 2:43 PM

Get ready for a cold snowy winter – that’s according to Wade Gilbertson, a Parkside farmer who practices the art of predicting the weather using pig spleens.

“It is a going to be a winter like Saskatchewan’s normal winters as they called them back in the day when I was a kid,” Gilbertson told paNOW. “They’ll be lots of snow and it’ll be colder than average until about January.”

While seasonal temperatures are set to return toward the end of January, the two months leading up to that “will be something we haven’t experience in years,” Gilbertson predicts.

February will be unremarkable, but by the middle of March colder than normal temperatures and significant snowfall will return to carry us into April.

‘A dying art form’

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Gilbertson has been using pig spleens to forecast the weather for around 30 years. He learned the basics as a teenager from some older farmers, but says it took him years of trial and error to perfect his own style, interpreting weather patterns from the organ based on its thickness and lines on the surface he reads like a graph.

He said his predictions have a 75 to 80 per cent success rate.

While it may seem mystical, Gilbertson explained there’s a logical explanation the organs can be used to predict the weather.

“Animals know weather patterns better than any other entity on the planet because they live in mother nature,” Gilbertson said. “These pigs that I read the spleens from are not indoor pigs. You can’t just pick them out of a barn and hopefully read a spleen off them. They have to be outdoor pigs and they have to stay outdoors all summer long.”

Farmers in Saskatchewan have been using pig spleens to predict the weather for over 100 years, said Gilbertson. But today with modern radar and forecasting tools it’s a bit of a “dying art form.”

Someone who’s willing to publish their forecast and open themselves up to public scrutiny is even rarer. Gilbertson, who’s been sharing his predictions with local radio stations for the past eight years said he knows of only one other person who similarly makes his forecasts publically available.

“You’re like a politician,” he said. “You might be right, you might be wrong and when you’re wrong they don’t like you very much. And even if you’re right – like this year – they don’t like you very much.”

You can view Gilbertson’s detailed pig spleen forecast here.

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alison.sandstrom@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @alisandstrom