Potatoes aren't only crop of importance in county By JIM SCHUH of The Gazette We Portage County residents tend to think of ourselves as people surrounded by fields of potatoes, especially at this time of year. Our county does lead the state in potato production, and gets in on helping the state to its top position in cranberry production as well, but there's another vegetable crop that's important to this area. It's the snap bean. One of every three beans produced in the United States comes from Wisconsin - the leader in snap bean production. Lots of those beans go into cans in Plover. Many of us have traveled along I-39 or CTH B in Plover, past the Del Monte plant that processes many hundreds of truckloads of beans every summer. But as we drive by, rarely do we think of our state's position in supplying the green bean needs of the country. It's been a good year for beans. The Wisconsin Agricultural Statistics Service is forecasting that each acre planted to snap beans this year will yield 3.9 tons of the vegetable - about 500 pounds more per acre than last year. Wisconsin processors signed contracts with producers to plant 67,500 acres of beans, so if you do the arithmetic, you find that Wisconsin will account for more than 263,000 tons this year. That's 526 million pounds. And that's only Wisconsin's contribution to the veggie portion of meals. Oregon ranks second in snap bean production, with New York third. Altogether, U. S. snap bean producers will harvest about 770,000 tons, or more than a billion-and-a-half pounds of beans this year. We must be eating our beans, just as mother said we should, and you'll recall that she added, "They're good for you." * * * Another big crop in Wisconsin is sweet corn - the state ranks third in production nationally behind Washington and Minnesota. Sweet corn growers in Wisconsin will produce 584,000 tons of the golden vegetable for processing this year. That's almost 18 percent of the national output. Eating good corn on the cob is one of life's pleasures, but it's becoming a sweet-sour situation. The corn is the sweet portion, but the sour part is that the season for corn on the cob has just about ended. * * * As long as we're dealing with statistics, here are some that might surprise you. First though, to provide a proper transition from previous comments, I want to note that corn is a favorite food of deer. And deer get into collisions with vehicles. Auto accidents with deer cost you somewhere between $22 and $43 back in 1998. And that's assuming you didn't even hit one. The owner of Krohm Insurance Strategies in Madison studied vehicle accidents with deer in Wisconsin, and he says the direct costs in '98 totaled anywhere from $81 to $161 million. The wide variation is due to the estimates of actual car-deer crashes - there were at least 44,000 of them reported, but there actually may have been as many as 88,000. Waupaca County generally has led the state in the number of such mishaps, but Portage County also has its share of them. The average repair cost of each car-deer accident ranges from about $1,575 to $1,865, and those figures don't include the cost of injuries or inconvenience, such as lost wages. What are your chances of striking a deer with your car? The survey says between one and two per cent of the state's licensed drivers will have an accident involving a deer each year. * * * Speaking of deer, the United States Postal Service will issue a set of 20-cent postcards at Rudolph next month. The Postal Service issued four Rudolph Christmas stamps at Rudolph last year, and will introduce the four new postcards featuring the same gold leaping deer on four different color backgrounds on Oct. 12. They go on sale nationwide the next day, but some already are in the hands of the public. They got out by mistake Aug. 17, after a clerical error at the Stamp Fulfillment center in Kansas City. Collectors will be able to obtain "first day of issue" cancellations at the Rudolph post office on the 12th. Purchasers will have to pay $8.95 for five sheets of four cards each - more than double the cards' face value. * * * Last week, the last few words of an item in this column were missing. To help you make sense out of what that item said, here in full is what it said (assuming it doesn't get chopped off again): At the Wall Street Journal, the creative work of a headline writer caught my eye. The story concerned an executive at Oprah Winfrey's "O" Magazine taking a new position at an upscale fashion magazine. The headline read: "O Magazine's Publisher Moves Down Alphabet to Assume Post at W." The executive also worked at teen magazine YM, and notes there aren't many more magazines with letters as titles. She asks, "What am I going to do after this?" You may reach Jim Schuh at The Gazette, or by e-mail at jpschuh@excite.com.