Though everybody is scrambling to convert conventional farms to organic, that most definitely wasn’t the situation when Peter Leahy took over his family’s acreage near Peterborough in 1988. Leahy, who once worked at a big chemical and fertilizer firm, had just finished a crop science degree at the University of Guelph—hardly an organics-friendly environment at the time. “A person would have been laughed out of a room for talking about organics,” he says. But Leahy started growing hard red wheat, corn and spelt organically; when he grew tired of shipping the grain 250 kilometres to the nearest organic-certified processor, he built his own, outfitting his barn with a massive oak-framed grain cleaner (circa 1910) and a granite-wheeled mill to turn his wheat into flour. Now he processes and sells grain from his farm and from other organic farmers in the region. He’s become a key supplier of feed to organic beef, pork, egg and poultry producers, including the excellent Clement’s Poultry counter at the Saturday St. Lawrence Farmers’ Market. And as far as we can tell, he’s the only significant (though still very small) local producer of historic Red Fife wheat, the dark, beguiling, nutty grain that was first grown here more than a century ago and then very nearly forgotten. (You can buy Leahy’s flour, labelled Merrylynd Organics, from his niece, Miquela Leahy, at the Dufferin Grove market.) Twenty years after he first converted, Leahy still believes it was the right thing to do. “We didn’t go organic because we wanted to save Toronto,” Leahy says. “We get our water from a well—sooner or later whatever you spray on your fields you’re going to have to drink. It doesn’t make sense to do it any other way.”