Huge Wyoming-Grown Greenhouse Embraces Grateful Dead Connection

The Grateful Dead and fresh produce might not sound like things that go together. They do if you’re in Sublette County, Wyoming. 

That’s where a 5,000-square-foot greenhouse that used to be called Satchitananda Farm is quintupling in size to 25,000 square feet and taking a new name to celebrate.

It's a name inspired by the Grateful Dead, the 1960s and ’70s rock band that spawned generations of followers called Deadheads.

The new name is Silver Stream Farm, inspired by the opening line of the band’s song “Cassidy.”

“I have seen where the wolf has slept by the silver stream,” the lyric goes. “I can tell by the mark he left, you were in his dream.”

The song, said Silver Stream Farm Chief Operating Officer Nicci Hammerel, was written just 15 miles away from the greenhouse’s location at the Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, Wyoming. 

“John Perry Barlow, who was part of the family that owned the Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, was good friends with Bob Weir, one of the lead singers of the Grateful Dead,” Hammerel told Cowboy State Daily. “And so, when Bob Weir came up to visit John Perry Barlow at his ranch, the two of them together wrote an entire album.”

After the greenhouse’s new owner learned that the song was written just 15 miles away, a name honoring that piece of local lore seemed natural.

“Our current owner is a huge Grateful Dead fan, and really specifically, a Grateful Dead art fan,” Hammerel said. 

So, in addition to renaming the greenhouse Silver Stream Farm, artist Scott McDougall, who helped design cover art for more than 50 Grateful Dead LPs and CDs, was contacted to design a new logo for the business. 

The new logo has a crow’s head with some orange flowers underneath in bright, vibrant colors. 

“His work channels the kind of rebellious creativity that drives us,” Hammerel wrote in her blog. “His design for Silver Stream Farm does just that: bold, grounded, and unmistakably its own thing.”

The Story Behind ‘Cassidy’

Barlow, who died in 2018, told the story of how he wrote the song, “Cassidy,” in Wyoming to a reporter in 2005. It’s recounted in a 2018 Buckrail article. 

“The chords to that song were written in Marin County in this funny little ranch that we had up in West Marin,” he told Buckrail. “There was a girl living on the ranch that had a child the night that Weir was coming up with the chords, and the child was named Cassidy.”

Later on, Weir came out to Barlow’s ranch in Wyoming to write his solo album, “Ace.”

“We were in an isolated homestead house on another part of the ranch from the main operation … my ranch .. and snowed in and kind of crazy, trying to write songs together really for the first time,” Barlow said. “We fooled around with some words for Cassidy and nothing much came. Then he had to leave and start recording some of this stuff because he had a tight studio schedule, and we didn’t have that one done.”

Barlow himself had a tight schedule. He needed to go out and plow a bunch of stack yards, ranch lingo for a small area set aside for stacking hay, before he could go visit his father at a hospital in Salt Lake City, where he lay dying.

“I kept running those chords around in my head, thinking about the girl Cassidy that had been born, and also about Neal Cassidy who had died not long before, who had been a great hero of ours,” Barlow said. “He’s one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever met. And thinking about how we come into the world and go out of the world and how there’s a kind of continuity.”

Those thoughts suddenly coalesced into a melody that worked with the chords in his head. 

After that, Barlow headed to the hospital, to be with his father.

Where Bees And Ladybugs Live

Bees and lacewings and ladybugs live in the Silver Farm Greenhouse, which, like the song it is now named after, started as something of a dream.

“The original owners had gotten together with a couple of other folks because they weren’t really pleased with the kind of produce they could get in the area,” Hammerel said. “So from 2021 until 2024, it was just a single greenhouse because they were wondering, can this even work? Can we grow with negative 40-degree temperatures and howling winds and being remote?”

Sublette County is known for a lot of great things, Hammerel added, but fresh produce hasn’t been at the top of the list.

“But what they were able to grow in just one greenhouse turned out to be amazing,” she said.

The owners added insects for natural pollination and pest control and found that worked well. It also gave visitors a thrill to see bees landing on flowers inside a greenhouse. 

As word spread that there was fresh produce in an amazing new greenhouse populated with lacewings, ladybugs and bees, the owners started to get interest from more neighbors, as well as a couple of restaurants. 

“So they said, ‘This works. Let’s expand it so we can serve a lot larger portion of our community,’” Hammerel said. "And so that’s what they did. In 2024, we began construction to build four more greenhouses.”

These four greenhouses are all in one building, but are separate “zones” where the climate can be controlled. Lacewings, ladybugs and bees still populate the greenhouse now that it’s bigger. There are just more of them. 

The zones allow optimization of climate for specific groups of produce. Now, with its new greenhouses all done, Silver Farm is ready to go, with 5,000 acres devoted to strawberries, along with other fresh produce like tomatoes, kohlrabi, melons, carrots, cucumbers, and more. 

Customers can either buy produce individually or sign up for a Community Supported Agriculture subscription, or CSA. 

“We haven’t even yet scratched the surface of how much we can grow,” Hammerel said. “We are thinking of 2025 as our ramp-up year. We are increasing production every week and just learning what people really love, in terms of how much of every crop we should grow.”

They’re also exploring partnerships with people who can make products from their produce, like jams and pickles. 

“I think it’s realistic at some point we can hit 100,000 pounds of produce a year,” Hammerel said. 

And there is plenty of room for expansion, if the greenhouse concept pans out and demand warrants more space. 

Though the name isn’t changing any time soon. It’s too perfect for a farm that began somewhat as a fevered winter dream of fresh and colorful produce on a dinner plate at 8,000 feet in Wyoming.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.