Snap Beans Roaring Out of County Fields

Tons and tons of snap beans are being harvested from fields in Langlade County as the summer growing season is starting to hit a peak.

Steve Zimmerman, the county’s UW-Extension agriculture agent said the harvest of beans is well underway and being loaded into trucks for regional canning plants for processing. But the beans appear to be the only crop from Langlade County that is going to the canneries, while in other years peas and sweet corn also were grown here commercially.

The bean harvest is a reminder that Wisconsin is more than America’s Dairyland.

Certainly the Langlade County area is a major milk producer, dairy product processor and one of the state’s leading potato producers, but there are a huge assortment of products that come from farms and fields here.

The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture said today that sales from food processing in the state is big business, totaling $67.8 billion.

There are 68,700 farms spread across the state on 14.4 million acres, with the average at 209 acres each.

Those farms provide an annual employment for 413,500, or 11.9 percent of the state’s workforce.

So watching the snap beans being harvested and loaded from a field along Highway C Wednesday, and the work being done on potato harvest machinery preparing for the season soon to start, are just a reminder of the importance of the industry to the Langlade County area, the state of Wisconsin and its residents.

Snap beans being transferred from the harvester northwest of Antigo this week.

Source: Antigo Daily Journal