Farmers and Weather

January 18, 1933  2° warm [36° F.] in the morning, but a dust storm from the southwest.  Mama and Mary sewed.  I repaired the curtains on the car.

Like most farmers, Cornelius Siemens [I will call him Grandpa Siemens hereafter] was an avid observer of the weather.  Farmers lived much of their lives outdoors, and the success or failure of crops depended on the weather.  In fact, Mennonites believed that being a farmer was an especially spiritual occupation because it requires total and direct dependence on God to provide good weather for crops or to sustain them through times when he chooses to give bad weather.  So many farmers recorded temperatures, precipitation, and weather conditions in a diary or ledger book.

Grandpa Siemens had a special Réaumur thermometer that he had brought from Canada to read temperatures, something it was important for him to have.  The Réaumur temperature scale started at 0° for the freezing point of water, like the Celsius scale with which we are more familiar, and had 80° as the boiling point of water.  This temperature scale had been popular in continental Europe and especially in Russia, and the Mennonites had continued to use it in Canada when they immigrated in the 1870s.  Gradually, it was replaced by the Celsius scale in continental Europe, while the Anglo-Saxon world had always used Fahrenheit.  I have added the Fahrenheit temperature (sorry, Canadians, I did not add Celsius) to the text of the diary whenever he used Réaumur.  Interestingly, he only used Réaumur for winter temperatures but switched to Fahrenheit for summer.

Also, it is interesting how he described the temperature as "warm" when it was above freezing and "cold" when it was below freezing, instead of using "plus" or "minus."

Ominously, the dust was starting to blow.