Vermont’s Farm Show Is Coming Back. It Took Seven Years.
The last time Vermont held its Farm Show, it was January 2020. Nobody knew it would be the last one for a long time.
The three-day Farm Show gathering at the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction had been running in some form since the 1930s — nearly a century of farmers, equipment dealers, maple producers, and dairy families showing up in the dead of winter to talk shop, compare notes, and remind each other they weren’t alone out there. The event routinely drew more than 5,000 people from across Vermont, New York, New Hampshire, and Quebec.
Then COVID shut everything down, and the Farm Show never came back. Not in 2021. Not in 2022, when the board voted to cancel and reassess. Not in 2023 or 2024 or 2025. The organization’s nonprofit structure couldn’t support a relaunch, and the agricultural landscape the show was built to serve had shifted underneath it.
This week, the Vermont Farm Show Board announced what a lot of people in the ag community have been waiting to hear: the show is coming back. April 16–17, 2027, at the Champlain Valley Exposition.
It won’t look exactly like the old one. The board is pursuing new 501(c)(3) nonprofit status and building out year-round educational programming — a signal that this isn’t just an event relaunch, it’s an organizational rebuild from the foundation up. In 2022, the board brought in Rae Carter of EmpowR Transformation — formerly of the Farm to Plate Network — to facilitate a revisioning process through an equity lens, engaging agricultural leaders across the state to rethink what a modern Vermont farm show should look like.
Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Anson Tebbetts called the return meaningful precisely because of how much was lost in the gap. “COVID disrupted so many of our traditions, which makes this gathering even more meaningful,” Tebbetts told Morning Ag Clips. “Congratulations to the board for bringing people back together to share, learn, and connect within the farming community.”
There’s something worth sitting with in the timeline here. Seven years is a long time for any community institution to go dark and come back. Vermont lost dairy farms during that stretch. It lost farmland to development pressure. It fought over Act 250 and Act 181 and where housing should go and whether the state’s rural working landscape could survive the regulatory framework being built around it. The people who will walk through the doors at the Champlain Valley Exposition in April 2027 are not the same agricultural community that walked out of the last Farm Show in January 2020.
That’s exactly why the comeback matters. Events like this aren’t just trade shows — they’re connective tissue. They’re the place where a first-generation vegetable farmer from Addison County meets an equipment dealer from St. Johnsbury, where a maple producer hears about a grant program from the Agency of Agriculture, where a kid sees a working farm operation up close for the first time. When that connective tissue disappears for seven years, the relationships it sustained fray. Getting it back is a big deal.
The 2027 show will feature Vermont food and product vendors, agricultural exhibits, family activities, and networking opportunities. Organizers are actively looking for exhibitors, sponsors, and partners. More information is available at vermontfarmshow.com.
It’s a year away. Mark your calendar anyway.