A DIFFERENT BREED

Cap Kiser's farm is a full family operation

Cap Kiser was nine years old when he got involved in the cattle business, and he’s been at it pretty much every day since. Most days he and his family work from sunup until after sundown to care for their growing herd and the hundreds-of-acres farmland they own and maintain in Morningview.

“My Uncle Todd got me involved in it and that’s how it started,” Cap says. He says he got involved in showing cattle at a relatively young age, but only participated in state shows.

The Kiser farm currently has about 65 head of mama cows, he says, and there’s usually between three and eight cows in the show barn. These elite cattle are entered into competition at the Kentucky State Fair and various national shows throughout the year.

“My kids have won way more awards than I ever won,” he says. “Used to be when I showed cows, we would start in November and end in August, but my kids show year-round in national shows all over.”

Cap says his children – Cheyenne (17), Lindy (13) and Charlie (13) – have shown their cattle in 21 states, from Colorado to Pennsylvania, Florida to South Dakota.

He and his children mainly show market beef animals and breeding cattle, though the children have added pigs and sheep into the mix at the county level as part of their 4H activities.

He says the national shows are for the elite heifers. “It’s kind of like a beauty pageant for cattle,” he says. “They’ve got to have the eye appeal, big bone structure, pretty.”

The prizes for winning are a banner and bragging rights, mostly. “What you win doesn’t pay your bills – that’s for sure,” he says.

But these elite cows become more valuable as they rack up awards. 

“We won Supreme Heifer at the Kentucky State Fair this year,” he says, “and that was a big ordeal for us to win. The heifer we won it with, we turned down $100,000 for her.”

He said while normally the family shows cattle with the aim of selling, an elite cow can be even more valuable for breeding. Every 60 days, a farmer can flush eggs out of one of these cows and turn them into embryos through in vitro fertilization, then sell the embryos at auction. A cow can produce up to 12 good embryos per flush, and Cap says he has sold three embryos for as much as $6,500.

And these show cows are living their best lives. He says they stay in an air-conditioned cooler room in the summertime, which makes them eat better, because, as he puts it, “everybody eats better when they’re cool.”

They are rinsed with shampoo and conditioner three times per day. After each rinse, they are dried off with a large cattle hair dryer, which runs about $2,000 apiece. 

They’re walked in the afternoon, if it’s not too hot, and they graze on the farm overnight once the sun goes down. They even get a pedicure every 30 days, because the show feed makes their toenails grow faster.

“They are extremely babied,” Cap says. “These things are like big teddy bears – they get taken care of top notch.”

They eat show feed grain, much of which is grown right there on the family farm. He says large steers will eat up to 42 pounds of feed per day in the summertime. Ever the entrepreneur, Kiser has turned the farm into an Umbarger feed dealership to help offset some of that expense. He sells to farmers from six different counties.

But still, the expenses are significant. Cap says he spends about $1,000 a month in the summer on electric and water for the barn. And then there’s the labor.

“I put at least five or six hours a day into the farm,” he says. “In the summertime, we don’t get in the house until 11 p.m., by the time we get everything done. And that’s not counting the farming part of it.”

The Kisers raise 50 acres of salvage corn and a couple hundred acres of hay to feed the cattle. They’ve also diversified the farm, he says, planting 7-8 acres of pumpkins and offering hayrides as part of an annual Kenton County Farm Tour festival each September, where he welcomes 1,500-2,000 visitors to the family farm.

“My aunt is doing a lot of the horticulture stuff now,” he says. “She has lots of bees and I think she planted 16 different varieties of pumpkins last year. We’ve kind of changed to get people to come to the farm and look at it.”

Cap is quick to point out that the farm is a “full family operation.” 

“My mom is a big supporter,” he says. “It takes everybody – mom, my wife, me, the kids. It’s a full-time job.”

“They wake up and start their chores every morning – if they’re showing pigs, they’ve got to have the pigs walked by 6 in the morning before it gets hot,” he says. “Pigs can’t be out when it’s hot. They can’t overheat or get sunburned when you’re out working them. A lot people don’t know that – they say ‘sweating like a hog,’ but a hog doesn’t sweat. So he can’t release his body temperature when you get to working – he’ll have a heat stroke.”
That is the hardest part of being a farmer, he says – keeping the animals alive. “At least a couple each year will die of something when they’re born.”

And there’ always the risk of injury. “Cattle can hurt you pretty easy,” he says. “Just because they look like big teddy bears…I had one jump on me and it broke my shoulder, ripped my labrum, and ripped my rotator cuff. That was about a seven-hour surgery and had me down for several months.”

“Luckily we haven’t had anybody get killed, but we’ve torn a lot of farm equipment up over the years doing stuff,” he adds.

Cap says he’d like to be a full-time farmer when he retires from SD1, but he knows he’ll have to ramp up the breeding operation to “make a lick at it.” 

That’s where his daughter, Cheyenne, comes in. She’s currently deciding where she will attend college to study agricultural business. She’s narrowed her selection to Western and Eastern Kentucky, Oklahoma, Kansas State or Purdue.

“She’s very involved in leadership,” he says. “Showing cattle and being around the people in the business has definitely made them kids leaders.” He also says that Cheyenne has been a junior advisor for various breeds in the cattle business.

“It’s a lot of hard work and determination,” he says. “But it’s a great family life. It’s a great place to raise kids. Your kids can run all over a fairgrounds and you don’t have to worry about somebody taking them because it’s kind of like going to Disneyworld. Who goes there looking for a kid when you’ve got your own? It’s just a great place to raise your kids.”

The Kisers have spent so much time at the Kenton County fairgrounds, in fact, that Cap has served as president of the Kenton County Fair Board for the past seven years, and was vice president before that. 

“People think the fair is only a week out of the year, but it’s really 365 days a year you’re planning it or doing something to prepare for that one week,” he says. “And everybody’s a volunteer – nobody is paid. There are probably 10-12 employees here at SD1 that have volunteered to help out at the Fair on a yearly basis. Any time we need a project done, they’ll come and help us.”

Cap started at SD1 in 2000. He worked in construction for 12 years and then served as the Trouble Call Crew Leader from 2012 until 2021, when he was named Project Manager in the Engineering Group. He works mostly with Clean H2O40 projects, and is currently leading the 2nd and 4th Street flood gates project.