A great deal of Punjabi agricultural knowledge is held in proverbs and rhymed sayings about when to sow, what weather means, and what a month will do.
The Ghagh and Bhaddari couplets, a north Indian corpus of agricultural weather sayings, circulate in Punjabi versions and are quoted by older farmers as operational advice: what a particular wind in a particular month means for the crop, when rain helps and when it ruins.
The desi calendar is the frame. Sowing dates are given by month and by lunar day rather than by date.
Some of it is accurate meteorology compressed into two lines and some of it is not, and no one has tested which is which against a century of weather records, which would be a straightforward and interesting piece of work.
The knowledge is held by the generation that farmed before the extension service, and it is being replaced by a text message from the agriculture department, which is more accurate and carries none of the rest of it.
The proverbs date the year: what to sow when the wind turns, what a wet Basant means for the wheat, what an early heat does to the grain.
They encode a climate that is changing. A proverb built on a March that used to be mild is now advice about a month that is not.
They were collected in the colonial period as curiosities. Nobody has gone back to them to ask which of them still hold, which would be a real piece of work about what the climate has done here.