My mother relied on her elbow for weather

forecasts. A later farmer friend B... relied on licking his thumb and holding it up to the west of where he was standing. Yesterday a friend who worked in agricultural research looked up at the sky and said, "Cloudy tomorrow." (It was clear blue at the time.)

My mother claimed her elbow would ache when the weather changed. She had broken it many years before and "just knew". In reality she was one of those people who was aware of the environment around her. The farmer was of course doing more than licking his thumb. He had been observing the weather since early childhood. He was, perhaps unconsciously, aware of many things that told him what was likely to happen. The researcher was the same. He had spent thousands of hours out among the fields, the paddocks, the gardens and more. Experience told all of them more than a range of machines in a weather forecasting bureau can do. 

I write this because our Bureau of Meteorology is failing farmers. The old farmers still know but their sons and grandsons no longer know. They have been relying on the BOM to tell them...and the BOM is failing. The BOM is struggling to get even the forecast for the next week correct.

I remember the empty desks at school at harvest time. The boys were at home helping to bring in the wheat harvest. There would be a forecast change in the weather which made it urgent to get the wheat in. The farmers would work through the night helping one another where they could. Now it is apparently all mechanised and it is a lonely business sitting in an air conditioned cabin bringing in a crop which has been grown to standards demanded by an organisation somewhere in the far distant city. Is the crop "organic", is it "genetically modified" and "does it conform to all the regulations"? 

As a very young kitten I ate bread made from flour grown in the fields of wheat and barley and oats around me. I knew how it grew. I saw it harvested and I went more than once to the mill where it was processed. I knew the miller and the baker and where my porridge oats came from. 

I didn't know about the weather but I spent most of my waking hours out of doors. Every other small child did the same. It was where it was expected we would spend our time unless it was very wet or very cold. Did we learn from this? Perhaps we did. If I had remained in that part of the world and gone on through childhood like I might also have managed to learn something about forecasting the weather to the level of the farmer or the researcher. 

Does it matter? I think it does. It is an old skill but it is one which needs to be revived. We need people with that curious "instinct" for the weather, the people who have learned to observe and read the world around them. They can do it without the expensive equipment which keeps failing farmers. You cannot build crop yields on the science which worships the gods of climate change. The weather and the climate are much more complex than that.