James Cox

"Variety is the only way to survive anymore" Mr. Cox tells me is I browse his many products. The variety of what he produces is staggering: pickles, sweet potato jam, apple jam, green tomato jam, raspberry jam, grape jelly, strawberry preserves, he even has two signature blends of spices to rub on meats his Butt Rub, and newly introduced Breast Rub that is sugar free. Mr. Cox grows most of his products next his home which is in the wilderness surrounding Mt. Vernon, Kentucky. Mr. Cox certainly has gotten away from it all choosing to live off grid, with his only electricity provided by a generator he runs only during the day. To most this would present a challenge of how to store their products with the lack of refrigeration, but Mr. Cox has gotten around this by relying on the same methods people around her have used for years, canning. "Not many people are left that know how to can. That's half the reason that my pickles sell as well as they do, even if someone can grow cucumbers they don't know what to do with it afterwards." Mr. Cox is one of the last of an old generation of farmers that are disappearing, and taking many of their skills with them. As Mr. Cox lamented about how little the new generations know about the old ways of farming, he told me about his grandfather who never used a tractor to plow his fields. Mr. Cox told me that his grandfather plowed his fields with a horse drawn plow until he became to old to handle a horse, his solution wasn't to buy a tractor or use hired hands to plow the fields, he simply trained a pony to work a plow. Mr. Cox ends our conversation by telling me that "the children in the city are lucky if they even know that milk and beef come from somewhere other than the supermarket. I'm honestly worried that if something doesn't change, people might just forget what my parents and grandparents spent their lives learning about farming."