There's no reason central Tennessee couldn't become the "Kiko Capitol of the World," according to Newman Ivy, a goat farmer near the small town of Decaturville, Tenn.
 The 78-year-old Ivy looks at the goat business through the eyes of a former - and very successful - hog producer. "We have the climate and we have the land," he says. "And we have lots of small farmers who aren't using all of their land."
 This scenario is what prompted Ivy, a civil engineer by trade, to go into the hog business two decades ago after retiring from the Tennessee Valley Authority after 38 years.
 "We didn't raise expensive hogs, but we raised good, commercial breeding stock," Ivy said. In 75 hog sales in the 1980s, Ivy sold more than $3 million worth of breeding stock.
 But as the hog industry collapsed in the 1990s, Ivy saw his sales dwindle as the small farmers in his area gradually went out of business.
 "When we started this hog thing there were 1.5 million hogs within a 150 mile radius of here," he said. Those numbers are long gone, but the land, the facilities and the work ethic remains, Ivy points out.
 "Hog people will make good meat goat people," Ivy says. "They're used to raising meat and they already have the barns and fencing. That's why I know this goat business will work in this area.  "
 Ivy made the jump from hogs to goats in 1997. He settled on the Kiko breed after reading articles and talking to Kiko producers around the country. He attended his first American Kiko Goat Association Field Day that year when it was held at Caston Creek Ranch in Wister, Okla.
 He also picked up his first Kikos at that field day, purchasing animals from An Peischel's Goats Unlimited of Rackerby, Calif. He was thrilled with those first animals, and continues to talk excitedly about the Kiko breed as he gives visitors a tour of his operation.
 "Just look at the meat on those kids," he says as he calls in the nannies and new babies. "See how wide they are down the back."
 Ivy's goats, grazing in former hog pastures, receive only minimal feed supplements.
 "I feed the nannies a 16 percent goat feed when they first kid," he said. "I give them about a pound a day, and in a few weeks the kids are eating half of that. But I don't increase the ration."
 Now that the kids are grazing side-by-side with their dams, he feeds a little grain every other day or so, he said.
 Ivy currently has about 90 head of producing does on his 85 acres. He'd like to cut that down to about 75 head of top-quality nannies.
 He runs a mixture of fullblood commercial and percentage Kiko goats along with percentage Boer nannies. His herdsires include fullblood Kikos and a 3/4 Kiko-1/4 Boer Genemaster buck.
 Ivy is following the game plan he developed for his hog business: sell good breeding stock and don't charge folks an arm and a leg for it. So far, the plan is working. He sells all of the stock he wants to sell and has calls for more.
 "We're poised to take off with this goat business," Ivy said, and the central Mid-South area is the logical springboard.
 "You can drive 250 miles from here and cover eight or ten states," Ivy said. "That includes a lot of small farms - and potential meat goat producers. It's our job now to get the word out."