How Wyoming hunters are feeding their neighbors in need

In Wyoming, hunting is a family affair. It’s about sport, sure, but it’s really about sustenance. It’s filling the freezer to feed the family. It’s the most basic version of grocery shopping.

It’s also something of a rite of passage. So when Jace Mitchell of Afton turned 12 last year, the minimum age for hunting in the state, he was looking forward to joining his dad and older brother when they went hunting.

The first 10 or so times they went out, Jace came up empty. And that bothered him because there was another family tradition he wanted to be a part of.

Jace’s mother, Sierra, runs the Afton Food Pantry, which she established in 2016. She helps keep the vulnerable in her community fed. The Mitchells have always shared excess meat they get from the hunt with friends and neighbors, but since the state’s first lady, Jennie Gordon, started a new program in 2019, wild game can be processed and distributed at food banks around the state.

Jace says he wanted to hunt to follow in the footsteps of his dad as a hunter, and also those of his mother in helping feed their neighbors.

He’s 13 now and can still tell the story of his first successful hunt like it was yesterday. And maybe he will always tell the story with as much excitement, which comes through the screen on our video call.

He was sitting on a hill on public land near Shale Hollow, about 25 miles from his home and nearly on the border with Idaho. He was with his dad, Mike, and older brother, Gage, now 15.

It was about 9 a.m. and they had been hunting for about an hour and a half when they spotted eight elk walking on the next hill over, about 200 yards away.

Tradition dictates that a group of hunters allows the newest among them to take the first shot in such scenarios. So, on the last day of the season, Mike and Gage waited as Jace lifted his Tikka 243 hunting rifle to his shoulder, fixed his gaze through his scope, aligning the weapon on the elk at the top of the group. He slowly squeezed the trigger and … he was no longer an unsuccessful hunter.

When Jennie Gordon was traveling around the state in 2018, campaigning for her husband Mark’s gubernatorial run, she heard a lot of stories about people who were working to feed hungry kids in their community. Gordon comes from a family of 10 kids, and her mother grew up in Austria during World War II, so that struck a chord with her. She knows about food insecurity.

Her husband won the race, and as the state’s first lady, she decided her focus would be fighting hunger in the state. She started the Wyoming Hunger Initiative, an umbrella for a number of programs that aim to get people fed, with the initial intent to feed hungry children.

But Gordon’s experience told her that if there is a hungry child, there is a hungry family. So when the pandemic hit, the goal expanded to include anyone who needed it.

There are grants to food pantries and soup kitchens. There is a program that lets farmers donate cattle to the cause. But the most interesting programs are the ones that empower the hunters and gardeners of Wyoming - which seems like almost everyone - to help feed their neighbors.

Those programs are called Food From the Field and Grow a Little Extra. Jace Mitchell’s elk went to the Food From the Field program, which allows hunters to donate legally hunted animals to a participating processor, who sends the meat to food banks and other distribution points. Grow a Little Extra does the same thing, but with excess produce grown by backyard gardeners.

Wyoming is a very large state with a very small population; supermarkets are few and far between. If you spend any amount of time outdoors - and almost everyone here does - you’re going to see wildlife. A lot of wildlife. Herds of antelope, deer and elk are everywhere.

And for many people, those animals are much, much closer than the grocery store. Hunting is part of the culture.

Like Sierra Mitchell, many hunters would give away extra game meat they had hunted. But that benevolence had to be grassroots; game meat couldn’t be sold or distributed by any official means, including at food banks.

Gordon didn’t want to tell anyone how to do things differently; she just wanted to use her position to make their good intentions more effective and efficient. So she created the initiative and got input from people around the state on ways she could streamline their efforts. (Mark Gordon’s time as governor will end with the next election, but the initiative will continue. It was recently granted 501(c)3 status and will go on after the Gordons leave the governor’s mansion.)

When a hunter gets a permit, harvesting the meat for food is part of the agreement. Literature about Food From the Field comes with it. The program got more than 17,000 pounds of meat to distribute across the state in 2023, and a total of almost 52,000 pounds since 2020. Hunters can take their animal to one of the dozen or so processors in the state, where it is tested for safety, processed and packaged in two-pound containers, then frozen and distributed.

And that’s just the meat.

Isaiah Smith’s home is just a few blocks from the state capitol in Cheyenne. Most of his neighbors have nicely landscaped lawns. But in a small strip on the side of his corner lot, Smith is growing raspberries, asparagus, beans, kohlrabi and tomatoes.

Smith isn’t a typical gardener. He’s the horticulture supervisor at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. So you might think that he has some inside information on how to grow things in the state’s relatively short growing season. But he insists that this is his lazy garden. He puts a lot of effort into the gardens at work; at home, he swears he just plants things and then hopes he remembers to water them often enough.

But on a quick tour of the plot in late summer, Smith shows me the pumpkins he’s growing. There are at least six under a huge canopy of leaves. As I step back to admire the size of the plant, I bump into one of his four raised beds. It’s full of cabbages, at least a dozen heads. They’re a small variety, a little bigger than a softball. Smith says that his family will need only about four of them. But it didn’t make any sense to grow just four. So he has extra. That theme plays out with every crop he has going in the yard. There’s extra of everything.

Planting more than you need is an insurance policy against the whims of nature: the weather, critters, birds and bugs, to name a few. It takes almost no additional effort to grow 12 instead of four. If things go right, you’re going to end up with more than you need.

None of it has to go to waste. Whatever Smith harvests and doesn’t eat or preserve will go to work with him. The botanic garden is a drop-off spot for the Grow a Little Extra program. Gardeners bring their excess harvest to designated spots around the state to donate them. They are then distributed to local nonprofit groups that get the produce to people who need it.

In 2021, the program collected just over 10,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables. Last year, the haul was more than 27,000 pounds.

When Smith stands outside in his garden, lazily watering, he often fields questions from his neighbors. They want to know what it takes to get this kind of production out of a small fraction of their property.

He can’t stress enough how little effort he puts into all the food he’s growing.

“I tell them that if they see it growing here, they can grow it.”

With that assurance, Smith encourages them to try to grow anything that interests them, and possibly grow too much. Because if their harvest exceeds their needs, he knows a place they can donate any extra.

Back on the other side of the state, about six hours from Cheyenne and within six miles of the Idaho border, Sierra Mitchell was showing initiative before there was an initiative.

She started her pantry to help the people in her community who struggled to get enough food. The building was offered to her free, and she started with $1,000 and 102 cans of green beans in donations.

“If you see a need, start small,” Mitchell said. “But start somewhere.”

Four years later, she got an email from Gordon. Gordon had seen a story about the pantry and wanted to meet. Mitchell was already doing the kind of thing that Gordon envisioned. The first lady’s interest generated more interest: from the media, local politicians and donors. More food came into the pantry. More freezers helped save inventory. Mitchell even got a geodome built on the grounds, extending the growing season for the fresh produce they give away.

Gordon asked Mitchell to be on the Hunger Initiative’s board. It’s easy to see why: Her enthusiasm for helping is contagious. Mitchell demurred a bit, but accepted.

“I’m just a stay-at-home mom, and it’s just a box of food,” she says she told Gordon.

Gordon corrected her: It’s much more than a box of food. It’s hope.

Mitchell, now 37, and her team of fellow volunteers - which includes her sons - keep the shelves stocked with donations. Before the Food From the Field program, the cost of meat made stocking protein difficult. But with wild game on the table, there is now a steady stream.

When a local hunter that Mitchell knows donates an animal, she invites them to the pantry to help distribute it. She wants the hunter to see the impact of their effort.

Her oldest, Gage, has donated for the past four years: two elk, an antelope and a deer. When Jace got his first elk last year, it yielded 114 pounds of meat. That one animal provided enough meat for two weeks at the pantry.

Mitchell says that elk is an acquired taste - they eat a lot of sagebrush, and you can tell - but many pantry patrons tell her they have acquired it and prefer the game meat to farmed beef. It tastes like home, they tell her.

It tastes like Wyoming.