To be a farmer is to be close to nature. Also, sometimes, to musicals.

“I tend to blast Hamilton while I’m on the tractor,” confessed Norah Lake, owner and head farmer at Sweetland Farm in Norwich, Vermont, speaking near a cluster of John Deere equipment one chilly afternoon earlier this year. A stone’s throw away, a farm stand crammed with produce testified to the vigor of her establishment, where apples and vegetables from asparagus to zucchini regularly grow alongside pigs, turkeys, and chickens.

Lake’s predilection for showtunes is not the only intersection of farming and theatre in the region these days. She is among the agricultural professionals whose experience inspired The Vermont Farm Project: A Farm to Stage Musical, in its world premiere at Northern Stage in nearby White River Junction, May 7-25.

The show’s creators—composer and lyricist Tommy Crawford, book writer Jessica Kahkoska, and director and show-developer Sarah Elizabeth Wansley—spent two years interviewing about 40 area farmers, working the material into a fictional story and fusing it with an indie-folk score. The project aims to include, reflect, and honor the experience of the local agricultural community, while also raising broader awareness, as Crawford put it, “about the state of farming, and where food comes from, and how food gets from the land to plates.”

That land-to-plate pipeline is under stress. Agriculture has always been a strenuous pursuit, but “there are a number of factors that have made farming a lot more difficult over the past few years” in Vermont, said Maggie Donin, farmland access director at Vermont Land Trust, a nonprofit that has lent expertise to the musical’s creators. Labor-recruitment challenges, as well as floods that ravaged the state in 2023 and in 2024, “have made an already sort of precarious industry with thin margins that much more difficult,” Donin said. (We were speaking before the unveiling of the new administration’s tariff policies, which are likely to create more pressure on the state’s farms.)

So Vermont Farm Project cannot help but resonate—all the more so, arguably, given a national environment in which a perceived rural/urban divide has muddied politics and all talk of climate change is politically freighted.

The artistic tilling of the show began after Wansley, who is Northern Stage’s BOLD associate artistic director, and Crawford, her husband, moved to White River Junction from New York. When they enrolled in Sweetland’s CSA (community-supported agriculture program), they relished learning about the nitty-gritty of crop and livestock husbandry. “We just fell in love with the farming community,” Wansley said.

When they hit on the idea of an original farm-centered piece, Northern Stage’s producing artistic director, Carol Dunne, was keen. “Farming is a huge part of our lives up here,” Dunne said. While the project seemed risky, “We have the ability to take risks,” she said. “We’ve built a very adventurous audience, and we’ve found that new work does very well at Northern Stage.”

Wansley had collaborated previously with Kahkoska, a veteran of research-fueled stage and screen projects, including Wild Fire, an oral-history-sparked play commissioned by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Theatre Company. Kahkoska, who grew up off a dirt road in Colorado and prizes rural stories, vividly recalls the first week of groundwork on the Vermont project. “I ate so much cheese and ice cream! I proudly count that as research,” she said.

A more cerebral part of the research involved calibrating interview questions. The thespians asked interviewees “for a lot of day-in-the-life texture,” Kahkoska said. “We asked about people’s favorite time of year. We asked about what stresses them out, about what is sustainable. We asked about how farming is changing.”

Across multiple rounds of interviews, interspersed with workshops and other developmental iterations (including a residency at Vermont’s Weston Theater Company), the team strove to do justice to the diversity of the local farming community, which ranges from graduates of nearby Dartmouth College to scions of farming families, from folks with day jobs to migrant workers.

Paco Mendoza, a manager at Newmont Farm—home to pumpkin fields and thousands of Holstein cows—became a valuable collaborator. Originally hailing from Mexico, Mendoza offered insights that deepened the musical’s portrait of the character Gabriela, an undocumented dairy farm worker missing her faraway family. Vermont Farm Project zooms in on Gabriela and other interview-inspired figures over the course of a summer day, noting moments of crisis and soul-searching as well as routine toil. Among the protagonists are a pair of veteran farmers nearing an insecure retirement, seasonal college-student helpers, and an idealistic young couple all but overwhelmed by logistics and finances.

Scenes and songs nod to activities ranging from weeding strawberry beds to battling invasive woodchucks to running a farm’s social media account. The number “37 Ways To Cook Kohlrabi” evokes an effort to hawk the under-appreciated vegetable at a farmers market.

“One of the things we heard over and over again from the farmers is what a range of tasks they face every day,” Wansley said in an interview alongside Crawford at Northern Stage.

“You have to be a mechanic!” Crawford chipped in.

“Right!” Wansley agreed. “The tractor’s always breaking down! And you need to be a veterinarian!”

The musical’s performers are themselves multitaskers: role-juggling actor-musicians who play guitars, banjo, mandolin, bass, and fiddle. An active local farmer-musician scene was an inspiration, said Crawford, a singer-songwriter and actor.

“A lot of farmers are steeped in folk music,” he said. “It’s a way of bringing community together.”

The farmers contributed to the design process too: Wansley asked them for photos of everyday work outfits to spark inspiration for costume designer Alicia J. Austin. Evoking certain muck boots has been a particularly fun puzzle. “These are boots that don’t get cleaned,” Wansley says. “They just live in the mud. How are we going to be able to create that onstage?”

Indeed, prettifying the material was a no-no. “I do not want this to feel like Disney farming,” she says. “There is a grittiness to farming. There are real economic challenges. People are struggling.”

Kahkoska is similarly clear-eyed. Interviewees “were really honest with us about their concerns for the future of farming,” she said, noting that, as a writer, she has found it tricky to “capture the weight of that, and also find a tone in this piece that is hopeful and uplifting, and find humor.”

That was a note Mendoza, who is also poet, gave after watching early versions of the musical. He told the creators that the show should convey the satisfaction that can buoy even the most laborious farm day. Mendoza pointed out that farm workers regularly savor moments of “connections—with the farm, with the things around the farm, the animals, the people, the sunny days, the hard days.”

Economic burdens and grueling daily routines notwithstanding, “almost every single farmer we talked with kept coming back to the deep love they have for the work,” Crawford said.

“Like being an artist,” Wansley chimed in. “It’s more than just a job. It’s a whole way of life.”

Celia Wren is a former managing editor of this magazine.