BUTTE — Ethan Berkowitz got an earful from Valley farmers Monday.

The former state legislator is one of many candidates in a crowded race for Alaska’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the Democratic primary, Berkowitz faces Diane Benson. On the other side, incumbent Don Young is hoping to fend off challenges from state Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux of Kodiak and Lt. Governor Sean Parnell.

Berkowitz was in the Valley touring area farms. Among other things, he wanted to know what he could do, if Alaskans send him to Washington, D.C., to help agriculture in the state. Janet Dinwiddie with Pyrah’s Pioneer Peak Farm, a farm in Butte where families pay to pick their own produce, said anything Berkowitz could do to make farming more economically viable would be welcome.

“I would love to forget money and just pretend it doesn’t exist, but it’s a fact of life,” Dinwiddie said.

At all three stops Monday, Berkowitz said he worries about problems causing farms to disappear. He said he’s concerned that if a disaster cut Alaska off from the Lower 48, the state would have a tough time feeding itself.

“I don’t think we grow enough food in this state,” he said.

Most immediately, if anything could be done to get some good, solid wildlife fencing, that would help a lot, Dinwiddie said. Moose get into her fields, she said, and can easily eat her kohlrabi crop in one or two nights.

At Palmer Produce Inc., which sells its own crops and those from other farms to local big-box retailers and grocers, Paul A. Huppert, the company’s president, had moose on his mind as well.

“Our biggest pest here is the moose,” Huppert said.

But what he’d like to see from the federal government is more of an effort to protect farmland instead of allowing fields to be converted into residential subdivisions and gravel pits.

“When gravel gets up to 10 bucks a yard it gets hard for some of these guys to keep out of gravel,” Huppert said of farmers who can earn more mining gravel than farming crops.

He said Alaska could support enough agriculture to supply a large percentage of the state’s demand for some key crops. But to get it going there would have to be a lot more people with the right skills.

“Farming’s a lot of work,” he said, adding that in the industry there are a lot of dreamers, but few with the expertise and work ethic to start a farm and do it right.

Over at Arctic Organics, owner River Bean said he’d like to see more of an effort to market locally grown crops, akin to that used in the fishing industry. He said he’d also like to see an effort to get more people into farming.

His small farm has 150 families that have entered into a subscription service to get a share of the harvest. He said he caps the number at 150, despite demand that could likely handle more.

“We can’t do any more, but we wish there were more farmers,” Bean said.

At the end of his Valley agriculture tour, Berkowitz said he had learned a lot. Despite the farmers’ disparate operations, their concerns seem to be similar.

“There’s the desire to serve more Alaskans, but there’s also concern about maintaining farming,” he said.