Have you kissed a farmer today? Well, no, I don't suppose you have. After all, we are a grimy, smelly lot, especially at this time of year. Kissing one of us is roughly as appealing as making out with an old lawn mower.

But I suppose you are wondering why we farmers would deserve any form of affection at all—even if we had cleaned ourselves up. We haven't, I would guess, given you candies or offered up songs of praise or cured your cat or even taken out the garbage. We have just been out in our fields and barns shoveling smelly things and grumbling about the weather.

Anyway, you probably haven't even seen a farmer today.

Or maybe you have. Actually, in some ways we are a bit easier to find these days. We are at farm stands and farmers' markets all over the Hudson Valley. We are delivering to restaurants and stores and dropping off shares for our Community Supported Agriculture members. And we are inviting people to our farms to pick their own produce or take a tour or eat a farm-fresh meal or even to lend a hand with the weeding.

And if you have not actually caught sight of us, you may well have seen the results of our work: the punnets of berries, the heads of lettuce, the wheels of cheese, the jars of honey, the packages of meat, the bouquets of flowers, the bottles of salsa, the cartons of eggs, the baskets of mushrooms, the bunches of herbs, the jugs of syrup, the skeins of wool. There's all sorts of local produce all over the place from old farms and new, from people expanding on a hobby and people continuing a generations-old line of business.

Standing amidst the abundance of an August farmers' market, it's hard to imagine that farming faces any sort of crisis—unless you count your favorite vendor running out of arugula early as a crisis. But New York State is losing farm land—often prime farm land—at an inexcusable rate. Once we have covered a farm with houses and asphalt, we are never going to get back that open space, the food it produced, the habitat it provided, the views it offered. We are a long way from running out of farm land, but that's hardly cause for self-congratulations. In the meantime, we are making farming harder for the people who stick with it.

The farmers who remain, however, are creating a wider range of agricultural products and finding more ways to get them to people—in part because we want to, and in part because we have to. And so while a herd of cows in a muddy farm yard becomes a rarer sight, local Asian greens and fruit chutneys and sheep's milk yogurts grow more common.

Obviously, local bok choi, no matter how fresh, is not an adequate replacement for thousands of acres of lost farm land. Still, it is an excellent replacement for the abused, defeated bok choi you find in grocery stores (if your grocery store has any bok choi at all). It looks better and tastes better. It didn't undertake a major journey to get to your plate. And when you buy it you support a farmer somewhere near you. With the help of enough bok choi eaters, that farmer will be able to keep farming the land. That is, in the end, all we are really hoping for. A kiss might be nice. But most days we are content just to be able to keep doing what we do and to know that people are eating and enjoying the things we grow.

So instead of a kiss, how about going out this month—the heart of our growing season—and buying something from a local farm. Now there's a tasty way to thank a farmer.