The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service reminds Americans to handle frozen food properly, marinate safely, cook ...

The Founding Fathers who gathered in Philadelphia to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 picked a nice day ...

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has approved over USD 120 million in new funding to strengthen climate resilience in Ghana, the ...

As energy costs climb and food prices stay high, more households are rethinking how they use their appliances. The ideal ...

When picking plants to grow in your garden, it’s easy to just go with what you like or whatever plants your neighbors grow. The problem is that not all kinds of plants grow well on where you live.

“This project is very timely, especially as many federal agencies, including the USDA, have identified climate change as an existential threat to U.S. food security,” Thompson says.

When choosing plants for gardens, plant tags and catalogues often include the USDA's hardiness zones to show where that plant ideally grows. U.S. growing zones Zone 1: -60°F to -50°F ...

Plant hardiness zones in Wisconsin range from 6a, which denotes an average minimum temperature of -5 to -10 degrees, to 3b, which is an average minimum of -30 to -35 degrees.

USDA zones are based on averages, not isolated events, and plants can be killed if the temperatures in the winter dip too low regardless of what the new map says.

About two-thirds of the state has slid to a warmer half zone since that last edition in 2012, according to the USDA. As the climate has changed, so have farming plans in Maine.

Zone 1 in parts of Alaska is where average low temperatures reach minus 60 to minus 50. Zone 13 in parts of Hawaii and Puerto Rico has low temperatures from 60 to 70 degrees.

Those zones have recently been updated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) based upon the 30-year average of the coldest temperature each winter in a given location.