CRAWFORDSVILLE, Iowa – A few years ago Holly Jones started studying the micro-climate and the topography on her family farm near Crawfordsville, about 40 miles south of Iowa City, Iowa. Jones said learning more about the landscape of her fifth-generation flower farm helped her recognize some of the ways weather and climate change could affect her operation.
“There are some areas of our land that are a little higher than others,” she said. “That’s going to impact, for example, when we’re looking out for frost advisories or frost concerns really early in the season or the end.”
About that time the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its plant-hardiness-zones map, which divides the United States into 13 zones based on average annual minimum temperatures in a given time period…