New Plant Hardiness Zone, Growing Degree Day, and Heat Zone Maps

Nov 03, 2022

Specialty crop growers and their workers, schedules, expenses, incomes, and crops are impacted by air and soil temperatures on and near their farms around the clock, even when production is suspended for the season. Temperatures never rest in influencing a long list of soil, crop, production, and cost-revenue variables. This fact explains why so much time, effort, and money are spent measuring, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting temperature data in ways useful to growers and others.

Two new resources outlined below will interest fruit, vegetable, and other growers.

The USDA-ARS manages information available at https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/view-maps.

The page includes updated maps of plant hardiness zones available at high resolution (e.g., see the images below and scale bars). Maps can be downloaded, if needed. Plant hardiness zones affect cash and cover crop selection and performance, overall seasonal scheduling, and other variables.

The USDA and U.S. Forest Service manage the large amount of information

The USDA and U.S. Forest Service manage the large amount of information and number of maps available at https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9ee0cc0a070c409cbde0e3a1d87a487c. Pages and maps include descriptions of current and projected growing degree days, plant hardiness zones, and heat zones. Also, links to other pages with additional information are available. The current (top) and projected (bottom) heat zone maps below are interesting in what they could signal about potential long-term shifts in crop selection and scheduling, farm worker conditions, the use of plastic mulches and low and high tunnels and related technologies, biology (e.g., pests, diseases, weeds, beneficials), soil nutrient cycling, and more. Still, farmers appreciate that even small, more incremental changes in the short-term can be meaningful.

maps

Source : osu.edu

Video: What’s at Stake in Every Slice | On The Brink: Episode 7

Six hundred Canadian farms grow grain for Warburton's under custom contract — and that partnership exists because of Canadian plant breeding. Now the man responsible for maintaining it is sounding the alarm.

Adam Dyck is the program manager for Warburton's Canada, a company that produces over two million loaves of bread a day for more than 20,000 retail locations across the UK. He's watched Canadian wheat deliver thirty years of yield gains and quality advancements that make it worth sourcing at scale — and shipping across the Atlantic. But he's also watching the investment conditions that produced those gains come under pressure. Dyck makes the case for a new funding mechanism that brings both public and private dollars into wheat breeding before Canada's competitive window starts to close.