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Last year, we were the first to cover RS11 on the eve of it hitting the legal markets for its first drop. Now, we’re sitting down with its breeder, Deep East Oakland Farms, to get the whole “streets to heat” story.

While DEO – the abbreviated version of the name used by the world’s most elite cannabis enthusiasts – already had plenty of hype going into last fall when RS11 dropped on L.A. via their collaboration with Wizard Trees and Doja Pak, that moment ignited a whole other level of hype rocket we’re now seeing live. Their second-place overall finish in Zalympix a couple of weeks ago with Zoap only reinforced the elusive breeder’s mark on the game.

We chatted briefly with DEO Farms in the months since things went to the next level, but always around really specific genetics stuff. His schedule finally allowed for him to sit down with us for the full tale of how a company founded in the heart of one of the communities hit the hardest by the war on drugs clawed its way to the top with elite cannabis. All that while maintaining in Oakland. The city has been notoriously brutal when it comes to statistics on the cannabis industry falling victim to crime. The nation’s oldest black-owned dispensary, Purple Heart, is still yet to reopen as thieves used the cover of last summer’s police brutality protests to clean the shop out.

Within this reality on a daily basis, DEO Farms continued its climb to the top.

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We asked DEO Farms when it was first exposed to the medical cannabis scene? He laughed, noting it was hard to date the initial exposure, but he made up a case of migraine to get his first 215 card about 12 years ago.

“I got the card first and was buying weed with it, but it was a couple of years before I started growing,” DEO Farms told L.A. Weekly. “The first cut I ever grew was OG. I didn’t know what OG was. It came as a cut called Super Kush. I still have the cut; I call it Vintage 98 OG because my uncles got it in around 1998 and it was just labeled Kush.”

Besides getting the hookup on the OG cut, DEO laughed while noting any cultivation efforts in the family were very separate, “so it was kind of just like they never included me bro. They never put me on. They never included me with anything. I did everything on my own.”

To start down his journey, he would purchase a house after working in his youth to bankroll it. Buy Deep East strains online

Before ever getting his hands on the property, DEO had previously scored some grow equipment. He put it in a storage unit while some of his peers made a quick buck. “I saved all the equipment, everyone else sold their equipment,” he said. Six months later he was ready to put those lights to work in the new house, but the three-foot crawlspace wasn’t going to be able to facilitate the new goals.

He went to Home Depot and got a pickaxe and shovel. His cousin would join him in digging out the crawl space during the week, and then getting rid of the dirt on the weekend to avoid any trouble with local inspectors.