In 1985, Ed Harbes III grew a bumper crop of potatoes. The problem was, so did other farmers.
Potato prices plummeted. It cost Harbes about $4 to grow 100 pounds of potatoes; the market paid just $2. He worked 100-hour weeks during the growing season and trucked potatoes from Long Island to Maine in the offseason.
“We knew then that we had to find an alternative,” said Harbes, a 12th-generation farmer on Long Island’s North Fork.
To complicate matters, around that time, his father retired, and Harbes took over managing his family’s potato farms in Huntington and Mattituck.
Ralph Freeman, a longtime floriculture extension specialist at Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) Suffolk County, encouraged Harbes to expand into flowers and other bedding plants that would be more profitable. Harbes also began transitioning the farm’s focus from wholesale to retail, and Cornell’s guidance helped the farm gradually shift from cabbage and potatoes to pumpkins, sweet corn, stone fruit, apples and other crops to increase and diversify their revenue streams.
“Cornell’s prime directive was to help people in agriculture get out to a good start,” Harbes said.
