“Green and Gold” is a drama that wears its heart on its work-worn sleeves.

A celebration of rural America and some of its admirable values, the tale of a dairy farmer who — in the mid-1990s, with low milk prices hurting him and others in the region — refuses to adopt modern approaches to his work, even in the face of the likely foreclosure of his Wisconsin property.

The relatively low-budget but largely emotionally satisfying movie was made with the help of Wisconsin-based fast-food chain Culver’s and the NFL team it also champions, the community-owned Green Bay Packers.

The pitching-in apparently extended to the cast: According to its production notes, upon realizing the shoot had but one camera, the actor portraying the farmer, Craig T. Nelson, pulled aside director Anders Lindwall and told him to pay for a second out of his salary.

Nelson portrays the aforementioned dairy farmer, Buck, a proud and stubborn fellow who practices what he preaches — being good to the land and the animals.

Married to his beloved Margaret (Annabel Armour), Buck is helped by his granddaughter, Jenny (Madison Lawlor), whom he and Margaret have raised but who has become frustrated by what she sees as the farm falling behind the times.

But to him, Jenny says in a bit of narration, “farming wasn’t a job or even a way of life — it was a sacred act.”

Buck is the kind of guy who helps out in the community and at church, where he saves the house of worship money by replacing its water heater himself, blowing the gesture off as the result of him being tired of getting cold water when he used the bathroom sink.

Now, he’s not above sneaking out of church when the sermon runs long to catch the kickoff of a Packers game.

“For him, it wasn’t the frozen tundra,” Jenny says, referring to the legendary winter-slammed grass of the Packers’ hallowed Lambeau Field, “it was the Garden of Eden.”

Cows on the farm are even given names of champion Packers players from the 1960s, such as Max McGee, Bart Starr and Willie Davis. (As a different sort of tribute, a pig has been bestowed with the name Ditka, after Mike Ditka, coach of the rival Chicago Bears in the 1980s and early ‘90s.)

But as much as she loves her grandfather, Jenny wants something more from life than “squeezing Jerry Kramer’s teats.” She’s a singer-songwriter with enough talent at least to be well-received playing at a bar and wants to see where music can take her — an “ambition” not exactly respected by Buck.

Buck has a bigger problem, one personified in a local banker, Jerry (Tim Frank), who is in the early stages of seizing the property because Buck has fallen so far behind in his loan payments. Although not a gambler, Buck eventually takes Jerry up on a half-joking bet: If his Packers win the championship this year, he gets a year extension with no interest; if they don’t, he pays up immediately or gives up the farm.

Never much of a football fan before, Jenny now lives and dies with the Brett Favre-led Packers on Sundays along with her grandfather.

At the same time, though, she may be poised to reap the benefits of giving a recording of her music to Billy (Brandon Sklenar), a well-known musician who’d stayed for a short time at a neighboring farm.

That hardly impresses Buck, who is blinded by an experience years earlier with Jenny’s mother, his and Margaret’s daughter, and who can be pretty tough on Jenny.

Heroes need not be perfect, and Nelson revels in Buck’s imperfections, seemingly borrowing from his fine work on the series “Parenthood” as patriarch Zeek Braverman. (Nelson is perhaps best known for starring in another TV series, the comedy “Coach,” in which he portrayed the leader of a fictional college football team and then a made-up NFL expansion squad, so it’s fun to see the actor again playing a character passionate about pigskin.)