Twenty years ago, an unprecedented ad in the Wall Street Journal caught the eye of Silicon Valley executive Chris Hoebich. He and his wife, Susan, flew to Fort Worth, Texas, where they found themselves under an auction tent late at night in the pouring rain, bidding $30,000 on a pair of ostriches. The final sum, with incubation and hatching devices, came to $50,000.
It sounds like a lot for two gawky birds, but the Hoebichs had a hunch. They had visited ostrich farms in South Africa and recognized a potential U.S. market for the birds’ durable hides and low-fat red meat. As farm animals go, ostriches have several advantages: they drink very little water, their droppings don’t smell, and they’re silent, except for the male’s melodious call in mating season. They would fit right in on the couple’s 450-acre cattle ranch in Morgan Hill, Calif.
Within a few months, that first breeder pair—from the first U.S. ostrich auction since the early 1900s—produced 90 eggs, of which 45 hatched. The chicks sold for $3,000 each. Over the next few years, ostrich farming became a fad among entrepreneurs seeking a quick profit. It wasn’t unusual for buyers to spend as much as $80,000 for a breeder pair, Chris says. “People would come with bags of money to buy the birds,” recalls Susan. “It was incredible.”
So Chris, an engineering major with an MBA from Harvard, left his job as CFO and founder/ director of Vitacom in 1991 and switched to full-time farming, taking over the financial and management component of their Silver Oaks Ostrich Ranch. Daughter Marianne, one of seven kids, soon joined in. “It was very rewarding,” says Chris, “to work outdoors with family.” Adds Susan: “It was the hardest we’d worked in our lives.” At its peak, the ranch hatched 750 chicks a year from 1,500 eggs. The Hoebichs not only raised and sold the birds but also produced ostrich meat and hide and started importing and selling other meats such as wild boar, duck, buffalo, pheasant and rabbit. Susan and Marianne drove meat-filled vans through the Bay Area, delivering to restaurants and caterers. Back at the ranch, they offered horse-drawn wagon tours, complete with picnic sites for lunch. A shop by the barn sold ostrich-hide handbags.
Like all fads, however, the ostrich craze eventually crashed. As the high-priced meat became less of a novelty, consumer demand dried up and restaurants took it off their menus. “Americans were interested in it while it was in style, but because they were never raised to eat ostrich meat, it’s hard to really change their perspectives,” says Marianne, now in graduate school at Golden Gate University. Chris closed the business in 1999 and retired, having profited nicely on his early-bird investment.
The couple still lives at Silver Oaks, along with 100 ostriches, seven miniature donkeys and a couple of draft horses retired from pulling tour wagons. “We keep the animals as a hobby,” Chris says. “We like having them around, even though it means an extra hundred mouths to feed.”
—MELISANDE MIDDLETON, ’02
