Deep East — DEO Farms to most people — is an Oakland breeder whose genetics traveled further than his own name. RS11 and Zoap both trace back to his selections, and both became fixtures of the exotic flower conversation. The brand is named for Deep East Oakland, right down to the avenue.
The Name Is an Address
DEO stands for Deep East Oakland. The breeder behind it — known as DEO, or Guero — is an Oakland native who named the operation after his own stretch of the city, 105th Avenue. That is the whole thesis: a neighborhood outsiders only meet through headlines, stamped on flower that connoisseurs chase by name.
A Crawl Space and Four Lights
He picked up a Prop 215 medical card more than a decade before anyone knew the name, and did not start growing for a couple of years after that. When he finally did, the room was a crawl space under a house he had bought with savings from early jobs.
He and his cousin dug it out by hand — pickaxes and shovels, weekdays digging, weekends hauling the dirt away. What they ended up with was a ten-by-ten room with eight-foot ceilings and four lights in it. Everything the rest of the industry now argues about came out of that hole.
The Cuts That Left the Room
The genetics are the reason anyone says his name. RS11, a Rainbow Sherbert selection, is his, and it is the cut that pulled him out of the underground. Zoap came out of the same line. Pink Guava, an OZ Kush cross, sits in the family too.
He also still runs a 1998 family cut he calls Vintage 98 OG — a cut that predates the legal market entirely. Zoap went on to spawn its own small shelf, with Lime Zoap and Tropical Zoap both running under the Deep East name.
How It Reached the Legal Shelf
RS11's first trip into the legal market came in fall 2020, through a collaboration with Wizard Trees and Doja Pak in Los Angeles rather than under his own label. That is the standard route for a breeder with a reputation and no retail footprint, and it is why RS11 was a dispensary name before Deep East was.
Zoap took second place overall at Zalympix in 2021. Zalympix is one of the more seriously judged competitions in the industry, so a second overall is not a participation nod — it is the kind of finish that moves a breeder from forum legend to shelf staple.
Where It Shows Up
Deep East's first legal drop in a retail store under its own name landed on Saturday, September 30, 2023, at The Marathon Collective in Canoga Park — Nipsey Hussle's dispensary, now run by his brother Blacc Sam. Edward Guzman handled the Los Angeles side of that launch.
Picking that store over a bigger, blander partner was the point. Ownership and legacy carried more weight than distribution reach, and the choice lines up with a brand that named itself after the block it came from rather than after a market segment.
The High Rise Read
If you only know the strain names, you have been smoking his work without knowing whose it is. Deep East is a breeder brand first — the value sits in the lineage, not the packaging. The label on the jar matters less than who bred what is inside it, and that is the whole reason to buy it.