This article appears in the December 2013 issue of Potato Grower.
Photos courtesy Jim Coombs, LLC
About 30 miles due south of Philadelphia sits the tiny borough of Elmer, N.J., population 1,395. A two-hour drive to the northeast will get you to Times Square; Baltimore is only an hour and a half away, and just beyond lies Washington, D.C. It is here, surrounded on the map by three of the nation’s biggest media markets, that nine generations of Coombs family farmers have made their living.
Jim Coombs owns and operates Jim Coombs LLC, a 500-acre operation on which is grown potatoes, feed corn and pumpkins. His daughters, Jennifer Coombs, who serves as operations manager, and Amanda Coombs-Shimp, the office manager, represent the ninth generation to have farmed this piece of land.
“From the late 1700s up until the early 1900s, it was just farming to survive,” says Jim Coombs. “An orchard, chickens, cows, vegetables—it was all on this one place.”
In 1946, Jim’s father George took over the farm and sold off all the livestock to pay off debts the farm and family had incurred during the Great Depression. In the ‘60s another farm was purchased and Jim came on with his father. Since then, potatoes have grown into the operation’s bread and butter.
Jim Coombs, LLC grows Atlantics, Superiors and Rebas for chipping companies Herr’s and Wise Foods. A big portion of their potato crop also is sent to Campbell’s Soup in North Carolina for use in its canned soups.
In most peoples’ minds, New Jersey is not exactly synonymous with potato farming, and the Coombs family knows it. Though they don’t exactly farm in the middle of a subdivision, they understand the perceived novelty of farming in the most densely populated state in the U.S.
“We live in a very rural area that has a lot of farms,” says Amanda. “But it is amazing to watch the reactions of truckers and haulers when they come to pick up our merchandise. They always comment on how they had no idea there was a place like this in New Jersey.”
Since 1978, Jim has engineered and built almost all of the harvest and grading equipment on the Coombs operation. Dump bodies, bulk bodies, windrowers and harvesters are just some of the things that have been manufactured in his on-the-farm shop in the last three-plus decades. In fact, Jim Coombs LLC’s only pieces of equipment not manufactured on-site are their potato cutter, tractors and trucks (though many of them have Coombs-made beds).
“We had several times back then where someone almost got really hurt when equipment failed,” Jim says. “I got tired of depending on other people’s work to keep us operating and operating safely. So in ’78 I built my first bulk loader, and we’ve made our own equipment since then.”
“The mechanization of potato farming has changed the industry,” says Amanda. “We have photos from the 1940s and ‘50s showing how they used to pick up potatoes in the field and manually put them into 50-pound bags. Then they loaded the bags onto a wagon…. What we’re able to do now is amazing.”
When asked what some of the biggest and most unique challenges they face are, Jim and Amanda both cite the liability of having a farming operation so close to such a major city as Philadelphia.
“There’s so much traffic on the roads that most growers in the West and Midwest don’t have,” says Jim. “The liability here is so high when you send a man out on the road here with a piece of farming equipment.”
They also say that in southern New Jersey, it’s not always as easy to find good hired labor as it is in other, more agriculture-oriented parts of the country. “One of our single biggest challenges is labor,” says Amanda. “It is hard here to find individuals who want to work on a farm.”
Yet there the Coombs family remains, on the same piece of land that Jim’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents began farming when the United States was still in its infancy.
“You know,” Jim says, “farming’s hard wherever you are. But it’s hard to want to quit.” He pauses for a moment before finishing his thought. “If you don’t like this, you might as well get out of it for how much work it is.”
From the looks of it, the Coombs family likes it.