Philip and Margaret Sargent did not take the conventional route to San Diego. In 1986, they built a yacht in Richards Bay, South Africa, loaded their three daughters aboard, and sailed to California with a plan — they would raise ostriches on the edge of the San Pasqual Valley, near what was then called the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and make the enterprise work.
Ostrich farming was not entirely foreign to California in 1986, but it was not common either. The Sargents acquired 35 acres on San Pasqual Valley Road in Escondido and established their operation with 100 birds. The location made a certain sense: the rolling inland hills, the hot dry climate, the proximity to a major tourist attraction. Visitors driving to see the Safari Park's exotic wildlife might stop to look at ostriches as well.
For a few years, the ranch attracted attention as an unusual local enterprise. Regional newspapers covered it repeatedly in the late 1980s and early 1990s — the birds, the family's origin story, the novelty of a working ostrich operation in suburban San Diego County. The Los Angeles Times wrote about it as one of the best of Southern California, calling it an 'ostrich oasis.' The ranch was, for a time, genuinely interesting.
The interest that undid the enterprise was not in the birds themselves but in their eggs. In 1992, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service concluded an investigation that found Philip Sargent had smuggled approximately 200 ostrich eggs into the country from South Africa by hiding them inside chocolate boxes. The deception was elaborate — chocolate is a plausible import from South Africa, and the boxes provided concealment for eggs that could not legally cross the border.
Sargent was arrested, agreed to leave the country, and was then fined $50,000. He was rearrested after attending an ostrich convention in Las Vegas, having apparently not yet departed. An embargo followed: Sargent was barred from importing live birds, meat, feathers, or hides. The operational heart of the enterprise — the ability to replenish and expand the breeding stock — was gone.
The San Diego Ostrich Ranch's rise and fall coincided with a broader speculative moment in the American ostrich industry. In the early 1990s, ostrich farming attracted investors who saw the birds as a source of premium leather, low-fat red meat, and feathers for an industrial market. The boom was real enough that breeders could sell eggs and chicks at prices that seemed to justify almost any scheme for acquiring new breeding stock — which may partly explain why someone would risk smuggling hundreds of eggs in candy boxes.
The bust followed the boom, as it usually does. By the mid-1990s, the market for ostrich products had not developed as promised, and operations that had borrowed heavily or acquired birds at peak prices found themselves in trouble. The Sargents' ranch had already ended by then, its collapse driven not by market forces but by federal law enforcement.
The 35-acre property on San Pasqual Valley Road is now a footnote in the longer history of a valley that has seen more consequential events — the Battle of San Pasqual in 1846, the establishment and eviction of the Kumeyaay pueblo in the nineteenth century, the growth of the Safari Park into one of California's major attractions. The ostriches are gone. The valley remains.
The San Diego Ostrich Ranch was located at approximately 33.08°N, 117.033°W on San Pasqual Valley Road in Escondido, near the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The Safari Park's 1,800-acre grounds are the dominant visible landmark in this valley from altitude. Nearest airports: KSAN (San Diego International, ~27 nm SW), KMYF (Montgomery Field, ~18 nm SW), KSEE (Gillespie Field, ~18 nm S).