Visitors of the Athens Farmer’s Market can find a great variety of locally grown goods and for the past five years. Danny and Pam Gregg, owners of Sweetgrass Farms in Prospect, Tenn., have enjoyed selling their cut flowers, vegetables and meats at the market. What started as an enjoyable past time has grown into a full-time operation.

Danny grew up on his family’s farm in Minnesota. While working for General Electric, he was sent to Athens to work at Brownsferry. At the time, Pam was also working at the nuclear plant.

“I worked at Brownsferry and commuted back and forth from Florence. We met, and then Danny couldn’t live without me so he moved here. That’s my version,” Pam said.

The Greggs lived in Athens, and after their three children finished school, they were approaching retirement.

“We always knew we weren’t going to sit down and retire. We looked at others who had retired. They sat down and they died. We knew that wasn’t for us,” Pam said.

As the kids left, Pam noticed they had a big house and a swimming pool, but they wanted something different to keep them outdoors and busy. She and Danny began thinking about and looking at farms in the area.

“The farm found us, and we have been there 12 years this month,” Pam said.

“I grew up on a farm. We raised pigs, cows, corn and soybeans. I also worked as an engineer for 28 years and had to deal with people all the time. We started doing this as a past time. Pigs and cows and goats don’t talk back to you like people do, and I found that to be refreshing. It was something that I knew something about,” Danny said.

Danny retired early, and now the Greggs farm full time on their 55-acre farm in Prospect, Tenn. He grows animals while Pam focuses on her cut flowers. She grows 75-100 different varieties of flowers throughout the year. She also grows blackberries, blueberries and figs. He grows registered Red Wattle pigs, broiler chickens, cows and goats.

The pandemic had a significant impact on the Gregg’s business, but things are slowly returning to normal.

“To be able to bring meat to a farmer’s market, you have to take it to a USDA inspected facility and they have to be able to do private labeling. What that means is the USDA inspector has to be there that day when you bring your animals in,” Danny said. “There’s only 12 inspectors in the state of Tennessee.”

Danny recalled that during the pandemic, getting an appointment to have an animal butchered was incredibly difficult as people around the country rushed to have theirs done, or fear of shortages caused people to obtain their own livestock. Facility workers contracting the virus also added to the wait times.

“It just moved the dates out to a year or more. If you wanted a cow butchered, you almost had to contact the butcher a year in advance, and it is still backed up,” he said.

The Greggs prefer their cows to be 1,000 pounds before a trip to the butcher. His cows are completely grass-fed beef. The cows he had ready as the pandemic began were put on a year wait. They lacked the cattle pasture to sustain the cows during the wait, resulting in Danny being forced to sell his cattle rather than yielding the beef.

“My number of cows would have doubled by the time I could start taking them. I would have had too many cows, and it would have cost me too much to keep up with all those cows, so I took them to the sell barn,” he said.

The Red Wattle pig is a lean, red meat pig.

“The pigs are born in the dirt and live out in the pasture. Danny plants turnip greens for them. They will eat the greens and then root around and eat the turnips,” Pam said of the way the pigs are raised.

Currently, the Greggs have close to 30 Red Wattle pigs after welcoming three litters this spring. According to Danny, the breed was first brought to America by French fur trappers in the 1700s. Once common, after the Civil War, people preferred pigs with large amounts of lard due to its many uses. The Red Wattle pig’s popularity waned.

In 1990 it was discovered that the Red Wattle breed had not been registered for many years.

“There were two groups of them left, one in Texas and one in North Carolina. They brought enough people together to reconstitute them as a breed. They’ve grown since them. Originally, there were about 90 pigs recognized with the traits that they consider to be a Red Wattle. Now there are about 3,000 breeding animals registered, and that’s all there are in the world that the Nature Conservancy knows about,” Danny said.

“Our business has improved since COVID-19, in part, because people have recognized that the animal is born in our place; they leave our place to go to the slaughterhouse; we pick the meat up and bring it home and then directly to you. It has basically touched three hands — ours, yours and the butcher’s. I think people have looked at that and realized that its better to pay more for something that is local than to get something that has travelled across the country and passed through so many hands. I think there has been a new awakening,” Pam said.

“We’ve been selling at the Athens Farmers Market for about five years now. This is a superbly run market. The people communicate to the world out there and do an awesome job. We’ve given up on all the other markets, and this is the only one we do,” said Pam. “I love the pavilion and the convenience to home. Here, they are a certified market, and they have a list of what is going to be for sale each week. People who follow the events downtown get to see that each week. Today, there was a huge crowd of people here.”

As for things to come, the Greggs have talked about exploring producing goat meat.

“It’s finding what the market is for goat around here,” Danny said. “As our country keeps growing, I think more people are going to be looking to consume goat. The rest of the world has been eating goat.”

The Greggs can be found at the Athens Farmers Market on Tuesdays from May until September 7 a.m.-12 p.m. When the market begins the Saturday market in June, the Greggs will also be there. For more information visit @sweetgrass_farm on Instagram and SweetgrassFarmProspectTN on Facebook.