Lethbridge (Rural Roots Canada) – We’re just weeks away from seeding and planting. It’s the time when farmers and ranchers start browsing long-range weather forecasts to try to figure out how to prepare for the spring.

Many such forecasts are out there. Forecasts based on lunar cycles, ocean oscillations, tree rings, computer models, caterpillar fur, and some secret formulas used by the Farmer’s Almanac.

A formula as top secret as the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices.

These long-range forecasts will tell you whether we expect above or below-normal temperatures or precipitation.

Normal is abnormal.

It’s not correct to refer to a normal as the usual temperature or as the temperature it’s supposed to be.

A normal is just an average of past temperature or precipitation readings over a 30-year period.  It’s a mathematical calculation.  Nothing more…nothing less.

Again, normal is abnormal.

Since the start of 2025, on only three days has the daily average temperature in Lethbridge been within one degree of normal.

Three days in a two-month period.

That’s how abnormal it is to be normal.

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