Winters are getting warmer across the Midwest. That’s affecting farmers

In Missouri, the average winter temperature is about 4 degrees warmer than it was in 1970. That’s also true for Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, and farmers are starting to feel the effects.
When Richard Oswald was growing up in northwestern Missouri in the 1950s, his dad had a firm rule: don’t plant corn until mid-May, when the first oak leaves of spring are the size of squirrels’ ears.

But that rule has become a relic of the past. In Rock Port, a small farming community near the Nebraska border, the growing season now begins more than a month earlier.

“If ground conditions permit it, a lot of people will plant the first of April here,” Oswald said. “When I was a kid, you would have never done that.”