Milton C. Borchard; Longtime Farmer

Milton Casper Borchard, a lifelong Ventura County resident and member of a pioneering Newbury Park farming family, died Saturday at St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo. He was 85.

He was born Oct. 11, 1911 on the 4,000-acre Borchard Ranch in Newbury Park that today is the site of Newbury Park High School and surrounding housing tracts. Borchard Road is named after his family, said stepdaughter Betty Bright of Camarillo.

The third-generation county resident attended Timber Elementary School in Newbury Park and graduated from Oxnard High School in 1929.

Upon graduation he began working on the ranch that had been in his family since his grandparents emigrated from Germany in 1867. Later Borchard farmed vegetables on the Oxnard Plain.

“He quit farming when he was 75,” Bright said. “Farming was his love--the ground and what it produced.”

He was a member of the Ventura County Farm Bureau and Camarillo’s Padre Serra Catholic Church. In retirement he enjoyed tinkering in his workshop and gardening.

His first wife, Elma, died in 1958. In 1962, he married Margaret Jones, herself a member of a pioneering Ventura County farm family.

“Mom and Milton were high school friends, and they each married someone else,” Bright said. “And then my mom was a widow and he was a widower, and they got together.”

Margaret Borchard died in 1993.

In addition to Bright and her husband, Pete, survivors include sisters Faye Mahan of Ventura, Helen Webber of Woodland and Maryann Traylor of Oroville; brother James Borchard of Woodland; stepson and his wife, Bob and Beata Nobel of Fallbrook; three grandchildren and numerous nieces and nephews.

A Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Tuesday at Padre Serra Catholic Church with Father Liam Kidney officiating. Burial will follow at Conejo Mountain Memorial Park.

Memorial donations may be made to the Padre Serra building fund or the farm implement building fund of the Ventura County Museum of History and Art.

Arrangements are under the direction of Conejo Mountain Memorial Park and Funeral Home.