New Episode
Short Summary
In Episode 69 of the Legacies Podcast, host Tom Ritchie sit down with Marty and Chris (CJ) Johnston, the brothers and co-founders behind Lune Rise Farms. The brothers share the inspiring genesis story of transitioning their Teeswater, Ontario family farm into a sustainable outdoor cannabis operation to save the property after their father passed. They detail the extreme pivots of early licensing—starting with a 2-foot stack of greenhouse blueprints under old Health Canada policies, only to shred them and go outdoor when rules changed. They discuss the realities of outdoor cultivation at scale, their strict 2-year genetics testing pipeline, and the creation of an on-site fresh-frozen processing facility utilizing six 40-foot marine reefers to arbitrage their harvest. Marty and CJ also outline their conservative retail brand expansion (growing from 3 to 13 SKUs) and why they prefer sticking to wholesale trust and premium live resin concentrate quality over chasing market fads.
Tom Ritchie Says: All right, welcome to Legacies, everyone! Legacies is powered by AVEO, leaders in sustainable vape hardware. I’m joined today by Marty and CJ of Lune Rise Farms. Gents, we finally made this happen!
Marty Johnson Says: How are you doing, Tom? Great to be here with you, brother.
Tom Ritchie Says: I show up to visit the farm, and Marty says, ‘Come up, it’ll be a gorgeous day!’ Naturally, it’s cloudy and pouring rain, and CJ decides to disappear! You guys are fresh off the KIND Summer Fair. Before we talk about current milestones, let’s go back to the beginning. What is the origin story of Lune Rise Farms?
CJ Johnson Says: I’ll leave the genesis story to Marty. This entire adventure is essentially his doing!
Marty Johnson Says: We have a multi-generational family farm located about two hours north of where we grew up in Hamilton. When our father passed away, our mother was faced with the reality of owning two properties and not being able to sustain both financially. CJ and I loved the farm, our families loved the land, and we were determined to find a way to keep it in the family.
Marty Johnson Says: We realized we had to dramatically increase the revenue generated off the agricultural fields. Around 2017, I read an article in The Globe and Mail about Hexo and early legal producers. I mapped where Hexo was cultivating and thought: our farm has better agricultural land, and their latitude is far colder than ours. Why couldn’t we do this?
Marty Johnson Says: Over Easter weekend in 2017, I printed a two-foot-tall stack of research and business proposals. We sat down for cocktails on Friday evening, and I said, ‘Mom, CJ, I have an idea to save the farm.’ By the first or second sip, Mom said, ‘Let’s do it!’ I was almost offended—I had spent weeks compiling financial models, and the paper stack just became a giant coaster for our drinks!
Tom Ritchie Says: Once the family was aligned, what was step one of navigating the regulatory gauntlet?
CJ Johnson Says: Our current outdoor footprint is actually Lune Rise Farms 2.0. When we began the Health Canada licensing submission process, the federal government was only licensing indoor and greenhouse facilities. The irony was absurd: we had pristine, fertile agricultural land, and the regulations forced us to design plans to pave over topsoil and erect an expensive glass greenhouse.
CJ Johnson Says: We were knee-deep in engineering blueprints and had paid for everything. Right as we were preparing to break ground, Health Canada updated regulations to allow commercial outdoor cultivation. We immediately shredded Lune Rise 1.0 and pivoted to full-sun outdoor farming.
Tom Ritchie Says: I remember those discussions when I was at Ample Organics. We were consulting with Health Canada and pleading with them not to mandate RFID barcode tags on every single plant in a 50-acre outdoor field!
Marty Johnson Says: Let’s be completely fair: launching this was a shared midlife crisis for both of us! We broke ground in the fall of 2019 during one of the most brutal Ontario winters on record, buried under four feet of snow. Then COVID-19 hit in early 2020, causing construction shutdowns and supply chain delays.
CJ Johnson Says: Under the old regulations, you had to fully build out and pay for your entire facility before Health Canada would even review your application. We self-funded with personal savings, friends, and family. By July 2020, we still didn’t have our license, and for outdoor cultivation, missing the planting window means losing an entire year.
CJ Johnson Says: By stroke of luck, our local federal Member of Parliament happened to sit on the parliamentary committee that passed the Cannabis Act. We met with him, explained our agricultural timeline, and he advocated on our behalf. Health Canada issued our license on July 17th—literally by the skin of our teeth. We were transplanting clones into the ground at the end of July. Needless to say, those first-year plants were not giant trees!
Tom Ritchie Says: What were your commercial expectations heading into that first harvest?
Marty Johnson Says: We had this romantic Field of Dreams mentality: ‘If you grow it, they will come!’ We figured buyers would be calling our phones off the hook.
CJ Johnson Says: Then our very first lab certificate of analysis arrived. The flower tested at 6% THC! I’m no agronomist, but 6% THC is slightly underwhelming when you’re trying to launch a commercial cannabis company. I quietly stood up from my desk, poured a two-ounce shot of Jack Daniel’s, drank it in complete silence, and went straight to bed thinking our business was dead on arrival!
Marty Johnson Says: That first season was an educational fire hose. We planted 42 distinct cultivars to see what could withstand our microclimate, humidity, and pests. In mid-September, an early frost swept through and wiped out half the field overnight.
CJ Johnson Says: While it was financially painful, it quickly weeded out unsuitable genetics. We narrowed our genetics pool down to twenty robust cultivars that could run the gauntlet of Ontario autumns. It laid the foundation for every agronomic decision we made moving forward.
Tom Ritchie Says: Consumer flavor trends change every two months. How does an outdoor cultivator plan genetic rotations when nature only gives you one turn a year?
Marty Johnson Says: For us, introducing a new genetic is a strict two-year vetting process. We dedicate entire R&D test rows—about 120 plants per row—to test resilience without hand-holding. More importantly, we test what processing format that genetic is built for: dried flower, pre-rolls, solventless bubble hash, or live resin.
Marty Johnson Says: We had a cultivar called Pink Tsunami. As dried flower, it tested at 18% THC and over 4% terpenes, but the market wasn’t buying 18% flower. We decided to run it as fresh frozen live resin through hydrocarbon extraction, and it returned 78% THC and 20% terpenes! That taught us to trial genetics across multiple extraction expressions.
CJ Johnson Says: Our R&D rows are the most exciting part of the farm, but you can’t fall in love. My first love was Blueberry Lemonade—she looked gorgeous all summer, and then one heavy frost killed the entire row overnight. Outdoor farming keeps your ego in check.
Tom Ritchie Says: Did you always intend to build a branded consumer packaged goods company, or was B2B wholesale the initial strategy?
CJ Johnson Says: Our advice to anyone entering cannabis is: go slow. This is an endurance marathon, not a sprint. We were licensed in 2020, but we didn’t release a single retail product until December 2023. For three full years, we focused 100% on wholesale biomass.
CJ Johnson Says: We launched retail with only three SKUs and deliberately kept that tight portfolio for eighteen months. We knew there were dozens of hidden operational traps under the surface. It’s far better to discover those bottlenecks with three SKUs than to launch twelve and watch your supply chain explode. With Marty’s 25 years in sales and my 25 years in marketing, we took nine months just to refine our logo. You only get one chance to establish brand trust.
CJ Johnson Says: Simultaneously, we launched an unscripted YouTube series documenting our mistakes in real time. We had zero desire to pretend we were corporate titans. When people asked what it takes to start a legal cannabis farm, we turned on the camera and showed them every blunder. Our goal was to make each mistake once, fix it, and move forward.
Tom Ritchie Says: That transparency is why the community embraces Lune Rise. Most LPs communicate through sanitized press releases, whereas you guys share the unvarnished grind.
Marty Johnson Says: We only issued one press release in our history—it was one word: ‘HELP!’ Many people bought into the fantasy of cannabis as a golden money printer. It is a grueling war of attrition where you strap on a helmet and keep pushing until someone tells you you’re done.
Tom Ritchie Says: You started with three SKUs. How many products are in market today?
CJ Johnson Says: We currently have 11 SKUs, dropping our 12th in mid-August and reaching 13 in September. Marty pitches fifteen wild product ideas every month, and my job is negotiating him down to one or two so our 12-person team doesn’t lose our minds!
CJ Johnson Says: Our operational mantra is: ‘If it’s not in the plant, it’s not in our products.’ When consumers connect with a cultivar like our Strawberry Cough or Peanut Butter Breath, we express that exact flower across pre-rolls, bubble hash, and live resin so they experience identical terpene authenticity across formats.
Tom Ritchie Says: How do you prevent overextending into fads?
CJ Johnson Says: Don’t chase every shiny ball. We focus on our core competencies: sun-grown milled flower pre-rolls and fresh frozen concentrates. We built an industrial fresh frozen facility right on the farm. Plants come off the field and are blast frozen within 90 minutes. That proximity allows us to wheel fresh frozen material directly into our solventless washroom without third-party transit degradation.
Marty Johnson Says: We prioritized Ontario as our home market. If we can’t build a sustainable business in Canada’s largest market, expanding nationally makes zero sense. We’ve added selective distribution in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, and we’re exploring medical channels.
CJ Johnson Says: We’ve seen companies brag about planting 200 acres. Planting is only half the battle—the Grim Reaper is waiting for you in October! If you don’t have the labor and infrastructure to harvest, dry, or freeze that biomass within thirty days, it rots in the mud.
Marty Johnson Says: In wholesale, buyers are terrified of ‘lunch bag letdowns’ where a handpicked sample looks incredible, but the 100-kilo order arrives looking terrible. With fresh frozen, processors aren’t buying frozen leaf; they are buying guaranteed extraction yield. We provide comprehensive COAs and extraction yield data so our partners know exactly what their return on investment will be.
Marty Johnson Says: We invested in six 40-foot marine reefer containers on-site. That allows us to arbitrage our harvest—selling a portion in the fall to cover operational bills, while storing high-grade frozen material to sell at premium pricing in the spring when market supply tightens.
Tom Ritchie Says: You recently had a major presence at the KIND Summer Fair through the Ontario Cannabis Store’s Ontario Grown initiative. What was that experience like?
CJ Johnson Says: It was unforgettable. We wouldn’t have been at KIND without the OCS spotlighting local Ontario growers. Connecting directly with thousands of budtenders and consumers was exhilarating, although after standing on our feet for two straight days, I couldn’t feel the lower half of my body! The OCS team, including leaders like Trevor Dayton, provided incredible merchandising guidance and operational support.
Tom Ritchie Says: Some agricultural operations advertise ‘Harvest Parties’ where they invite the public out. What is your take on that?
Marty Johnson Says: Anyone hosting a harvest party has never harvested cannabis in their life! Harvest is 12-hour, freezing-cold, sticky manual labor. The last thing we need is spectators asking questions while the clock is ticking against frost. You can come visit on November 1st when the crop is safely in the freezer!
CJ Johnson Says: Our harvest kicks off in late September and runs five weeks through November for late-finishing cultivars like Three Blue Kings and Strawberry Cough. For our recent expansion to 12 acres, we pre-contracted the additional acreage for distillate extraction, which establishes a predictable revenue floor while we learn to operate at scale.
Tom Ritchie Says: What does long-term expansion look like on a 150-acre property?
CJ Johnson Says: We view growth like a chessboard. First, you master the agronomics, costs, and labor for a single square—our initial six acres of craft frozen and cured flower. Once that square operates with machine-like precision, you expand to a second square, like our six acres for extraction input. Anyone jumping from one square to five without dialing in their unit economics is setting themselves up for failure.
Tom Ritchie Says: Marty, CJ—your authenticity, methodical discipline, and passion for Ontario agricultural craft are exactly what this industry needs. Thank you for joining us on Legacies!
Marty Johnson Says: Thanks so much, Tom. We’re putting your name down for the harvest trim crew this October!
CJ Johnson Says: Bring your rubber boots and scissors, Tom! Thanks for having us on, brother.
Jump to 01:28
Jump to 04:12
Jump to 03:35
Co-Founder & CEO
Marty Johnston is a tech sales veteran, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Lune Rise Farms.
View Guest Profile ↗
Licensed Producer
Lune Rise Farms is a premium, outdoor-focused craft cannabis brand located near Teeswater, Ontario. Founded by brothers Marty and Chris...
Learn More About Partner ↗Marty Johnston explains that under initial Health Canada rules, they spent significant capital designing a greenhouse facility. The moment Health Canada permitted outdoor cultivation, they scrapped the indoor blueprints (Lune Rise 1.0) and pivoted to an outdoor farm (Lune Rise 2.0) to leverage their agricultural land.
Lune Rise uses a rigorous two-year evaluation process. Cultivars are tested in dedicated R&D rows for frost resistance, disease threshold, and terpene expression. A strain is only expanded to larger acreage if it successfully survives the local climate gauntlet.
By freezing harvested plants within 90 minutes of cutting them, the farm captures and preserves sun-grown terpenes at peak ripeness. This proximity-based fresh-frozen strategy allows them to yield high-quality raw material for bubble hash, live rosin, and hydrocarbon live resin.
