PINEDALE — Nicci Hammerel of Sublette County’s Silver Stream Farm had an outside-the-box afternoon snack recently.
She sautéed a bunch of lion’s mane mushrooms in garlic and butter and ate them straight out of the pan.
The mushrooms had been grown at an altitude of nearly 8,000 feet by the mushroom manager in one of the greenhouses that comprise Silver Stream Farm.
“It’s funny,” she said. “When you have a fridge full of vegetables, you eat more vegetables.”
Food Desert Mission
Since it started in 2023 with a mission to grow fresh produce in a food desert — high in the rural western Wyoming mountains — the farm’s produce has skyrocketed to a place at tables throughout Sublette and Teton counties.
A young venture capitalist and Stanford graduate named Dakin Sloss bought the 600-acre parcel of land at the top of what locals call The Rim in northern Sublette County because he saw a problem that needed solving.
With a growing season that typically lasts fewer than 90 days, locals have limited options for fresh produce that doesn’t travel hundreds of miles to reach them.
“This is a farm looking to solve a major pain point that Wyomingites have,” said Hammerel, the chief operating officer of Silver Stream Farm.
Too much moving around of food degrades its quality, Hammerel said. But growing fresh produce at high elevation with a short growing season doesn’t just happen.
Since Sloss bought the property in 2023, the farm has learned how to operate on advanced technological systems for growing produce.
Much of the knowledge comes from the Netherlands, which has an extensive history of indoor farming.
The philosophy was, “Let’s build a hill on the shoulders of giants,” Hammerel said.
Exponential Growth
When it started, the farm couldn’t keep up with local demand, Cowboy State Daily previously reported.
Locals could stop by for fresh produce on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Vegetables of all kinds — root, leafy greens, trellis climbers — grew in one greenhouse with a heated floor.
A ceiling curtain system created shade when needed or an insulation barrier during the winter. Irrigation in some areas of the greenhouse was computer controlled.
Two years later, the farm had quintupled in size, growing from one 5,000-square-foot greenhouse to five greenhouses totaling 25,000 square feet of growing area.
The four newer greenhouses are all in one building, each climate controlled according to a specific zone.
“We are thinking of 2025 as our ramp-up year,” Hammerel told Cowboy State Daily last spring. “We are increasing production every week and just learning what people really love, in terms of how much of every crop we should grow.”
Hammerel is the only one on the team who doesn’t have an agriculture background. A team of 10 workers, each with various skill sets, grows the produce.
Some are skilled in fruiting crops. Others know how to tend to leafy greens. Others still handle post-production tasks such as harvesting and packing.
Last year, the company hired a mushroom farm manager.
Silver Stream Farm grew rapidly in 2025, from serving 63 direct customers in 2024 to more than 280 in 2025.
Now in 2026, the greenhouses have yet to reach the ceiling of the number of pounds of produce per year it can grow.
Once it reaches that point, expected to be in 2027, the facility will have a cap on how much it can produce each year.
Serving two counties with fresh, locally grown produce, the greenhouse is at a crossroads.
“How do we increase the reach of our produce without increasing the cost of distribution?” said Hammerel, who has been with the farm since late 2024.
Wyoming lacks distribution channels, she added.
Year Of Firsts
If 2025 was the “ramp-up” year, it was also a year of firsts for the growing enterprise.
Silver Stream Farm sold produce at its first farmers markets, in Jackson and Bondurant. It opened its first community supported agriculture (CSA) subscription, which owner Sloss had dreamed of doing from the beginning.
It changed its name from the SatChitAnanda Ranch (stemming from a Hindu concept that means truth, consciousness, and bliss) to Silver Stream Farm.
The new name is a nod to a Grateful Dead song written at the Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, 15 miles from the property by longtime Sublette County resident John Perry Barlow and Bob Weir, one of the Grateful Dead’s lead singers. Barlow died in 2018.
And in 2025, the farm started growing mushrooms.
“Last year was all about getting out there and getting people aware that we exist,” Hammerel said. “The reception’s been tremendous.”
CSA And Food Banks
With its new CSA subscriptions, Silver Stream organizes two pickups in Sublette County each week.
The refrigerated van, emblazoned with the company’s bright logo, brings boxes of pre-selected produce to Sublette County, where CSA subscribers wait in line to pick up their fresh vegetables and fruits.
Paula Scott from Big Piney in southern Sublette County will soon start meeting the van driver in Daniel (midway between Pinedale and Big Piney) to bring produce orders to a growing number of customers in Big Piney and neighboring Marbleton.
Last year, the farm supplied fresh produce to three food banks — the Pinedale Food Basket, the Food Bank of Wyoming and the Jackson Food Cupboard — with the help of a grant.
“The grant allowed us to still grow in the way we need to become a sustainable business in the early years,” Hammerel said.
The farm is in a pilot program to supply fresh produce to food banks in Star Valley and reaching Lincoln County.
Distribution challenges prevent the delivery driver from driving to Lincoln County each week, on top of the already-scheduled stops in Teton and Sublette counties. But a representative of the Star Valley food bank has agreed to meet the driver at Hoback Junction.
Little by little, distribution is expanding “through those creative ways of thinking about what junctions we are passing through and when,” Hammerel said.
MMM Shrooms
Weekly CSA subscribers recently received their first batch of greenhouse-grown mushrooms, which represent a “totally different way of growing things,” Hammerel said.
The mushroom growing operation is highly technical, she said, because the process has to be clean and free of outside contaminants.
“It’s very easy for mushrooms to not grow if not in the right environment,” Hammerel said.
The first two types of mushrooms to make their appearance in the Silver Stream greenhouses are lion’s mane and blue oyster.
Recently, one of the farm’s CSA subscribers shared that she had added the mushrooms to her family favorite Lockhart beef vegetable stew and they gave a subtle touch to their dinner.
Now the farm is working on forging more partnerships with other small businesses and producers, such as beef from the Daniel-owned Killpecker Cattle Co.
“The more partnerships we can do like that, the more we can support a true regional food system,” Hammerel said.
Kate Meadows can be reached at kate@cowboystatedaily.com.
