Building a farm: Part 1
The Visits
We first came out to Irish Oaks Ranch in Valley Center on November 16, 2021. My family looked for land for 5 years to build a polo facility after the closing of San Diego Polo Club in Del Mar. My dad sent me a link to a listing for Irish Oaks and as I started scrolling through pictures, I was immediately excited. Irish Oaks was previously a race horse training and breeding facility, so the pictures showed an old race track, big barn, and lots of pasture space. We’d looked at orchards and undeveloped land so the existing infrastructure felt like a huge bonus. Sure, it needed some love, but it felt like a great start.
We pulled up to the farm caravan style: me, my dad, Graham Bray (longtime family friend, the manager of Twin Palms Polo Club in Thermal, and my dad’s professional polo player), and Jessica Bailey (longtime family friend, our real estate agent, and a fellow polo player). We walked the property together, all of us with a vested interest in this property being “the one”. Finding a piece of land suitable for a polo field is tricky to say the least, especially in Southern California. Essentially you need 10 acres of flat (ish) land. A tall order. But lo and behold, a racetrack (flat), with pastures inside the track (flat), and pastures all around (also flat). Ok, sure there was a well and power pole in the middle of it all, but that’s just a bullet point right now.
The first visit was filled with palpable excitement thinking about all of the possibilities. “We could put this here!” “Oh, this would be perfect for that!” Paired with boulders, massive blue agaves, horses in their pastures, and a beautiful sunset casting a pink hue on the surrounding mountains, I was in love.
Cut to our next visit on December 4, 2021, we start looking at everything a bit more critically. You could see glimpses of the ranch’s former glory, but now almost everything was dilapidated, rusted out, falling down. Our excitement waned.
60 stall barn! That will need to be entirely refurbished. New metal, new wood, new paint.
Existing waterlines! That we would soon find criss cross all over the property with no written plan or indication as to where they lead.
Fenced pastures! Only about 10 small corrals are safe enough to use. The rest will be demoed and replaced. Add demo to the “unexpected expense” pile.
Nevertheless we forged on. This was the property.