Coastal Sun is a Santa Cruz County cannabis farm run by Strong Agronomy Management, growing organic sungrown and mixed-light greenhouse flower for California dispensaries. The business started in 2015 growing organic blueberries for Whole Foods and pivoted to cannabis a year later. In August 2026 Headset ranked it ninth in California flower sales, not bad for a farm that still keeps blueberries in the ground.
From Whole Foods blueberries to the Forbes list
Darren Story, Phil Engfer, Johnny Martishius, Michael McCarthy and Angus Mills co-founded the company, and Forbes named all five to its 2026 Cannabis 42.0 list, picked from nearly 200 applicants. Forbes put revenue at about $20 million for the prior year and called the business steady and profitable. State records list Story, Engfer, Martishius and Mills as owners of Strong Agronomy Management, which holds the Coastal Sun distribution license.
The fruit never left. Strong Agronomy still grows organic blueberries in containers under hoops, with San Joaquin, Snow Chaser, South Moon, Spring High and Jewel varieties in the rotation, and sells them under a sister label, Coastal Moon Farm, out of Watsonville. Plant health team manager Joseph Tampas oversees the blocks, and Santa Cruz County producer Terroir in a Jar turns Coastal Moon berries into jam.
Inside the 48,000-square-foot greenhouse
Greenhouse flower comes out of a 48,000-square-foot flowering house that mixes sunlight with supplemental LEDs, translucent windows, light-deprivation curtains and upgraded airflow, which lets Coastal Sun harvest year-round. Plants grow in living soil on bioponics, a system that builds a microbial ecosystem into each pot and recycles water, nutrients and growing media.
The team calls the approach Modern Organics: managing temperature, humidity, irrigation, light-dep cycles and pest management with tech, while keeping the inputs clean. Coastal Sun says it holds USDA Organic, OCal and EnvirOganic certifications; OCal is the California Department of Food and Agriculture's comparable-to-organic standard for cannabis. It's the opposite approach from Watsonville's Fog City Farms, which stacks indoor canopy on mobile racks.
75 cultivars in the sungrown fields
Sungrown flower is full-term outdoor, grown with cover crops, hedgerows, insectaries, companion planting and grazing animals worked into the fields.
For summer 2026 the farm put 75 strains in the ground between its main Santa Cruz County site and its partner farms, from staples like Blue Dream and GMO to crosses such as Garlic Cocktail and Obama Runtz x Mule Fuel. Plants get scored on yield, terpene and cannabinoid content and potency, and only the top performers make it to shelves.
Not all of the sungrown comes from the home farm. Coastal Sun sources sungrown flower from farms that work the same regenerative way, including Foothill River Farms and Riverstar Ranch in Grass Valley and La Cuesta Encantada in Mendocino. Demand outran supply this year: by late May the 28-gram sungrown bags were nearly sold out ahead of the 2026 Croptober harvest.
Banjo, Hash Burger and the house lineup
Banjo is the house cultivar, a Boost and Tangelo cross bred in-house by Strong Agronomy, and it anchors the brand. The greenhouse menu also carries GMO Garlic Cookies and Hash Burger, the Han Solo Hash Plant x Double Burger cross Leafly named its 2025 Strain of the Year; Leafly counted Coastal Sun among the California farms growing it. Other rotations include Lemon Cherry Sherbet, Miracle Fruit and Ice Cream Cake.
The formats split cleanly by grow style:
- Greenhouse eighths (3.5g) and 14-gram bags
- Dog Walkers, a 10-pack of 0.35-gram mini pre-rolls
- Infused pre-roll 2-packs (0.75g total), 80% flower and 20% sugar concentrate
- Sungrown 7-gram jars and 28-gram bags
- Sungrown 14-packs of half-gram pre-rolls
- 7-gram diamond-infused sungrown flower
Two State Fair medals and a top-10 flower brand
At the 2026 California Cannabis Awards, held during the California State Fair, GMO Garlic Cookies took silver for total cannabinoids and bronze for CBDa in mixed-light flower. The cultivar is selling too: in August 2026 it ranked second among the brand's products, behind the Banjo pre-roll 10-pack and ahead of Banjo eighths.
Headset has Coastal Sun stocked in 173 licensed California dispensaries, deepest in Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Santa Ana and Long Beach. Flower made up about three-quarters of August 2026 sales and pre-rolls the rest. The brand peaked at sixth in California flower in September 2025.
Budtender tours, beach clean-ups and Volcano bags
From April through July 2026 the farm hosted more than 180 budtenders from its retail accounts. Visitors walked the greenhouses, the cover-cropped fields and the USDA-certified organic blueberries, met the herd of goats, eight of them born that season, and some left with a blueberry bush. Operations director ShyAnn and NorCal lead brand ambassador Claire were among the hosts.
The road show leans hands-on. Coastal Sun ambassadors join Big Pete's Treats for its Santa Cruz Main Beach clean-ups, and the team worked Farmer's Cup Spring 2026 in San Diego with two Storz & Bickel Volcanoes at the booth. On August 22, 2026, a Storz & Bickel night at Sessions by the Bay in San Diego filled more than 100 Volcano bags with Coastal Sun flower, and the brand also turned up at Tenth House's Soft Sundays social hour in Los Angeles.
For adults 21 and over.