Randall “Randy” Gene Cragoe died February 23, 2026, at his home in Ottumwa, Iowa.
He was born October 25, 1957, in Luverne, Minnesota, to Eugene LeRoy and Colleen Kay Rust Cragoe. The young parents ushered Randy into a farm life that would profoundly shape and prepare him for all major events yet to come. Agriculture — dairy farming in particular — fed Randy’s lifelong wonder and his strong connections to mysteries found in the natural world; it instilled in him a remarkable perseverance and optimism when driving life’s sharp corners and fed his infectious zest for life. “Everything in life I learned from a cow,” Randy would explain later in life, with his signature childlike grin and amused chuckle.
While Randy attended elementary school in Magnolia, Minnesota, and high school in Luverne, Minnesota, his formative years gave Randy opportunities to participate and hold leadership roles in FFA, 4-H, and the family farm. After high school, Randy furthered his pursuit by attending farm management school in Faribault, Minnesota, and community college in Worthington, Minnesota. He later shifted his agricultural focus to a career off the farm, spending close to 40 years in multiple sales and leadership positions promoting animal health technologies for biotechnology companies. During his career, he earned a MiniMBA with his study based in Ireland. Always a farm kid at heart, he marveled at how his path had unexpectedly thrust him into an exciting global world, yet kept him firmly grounded in his love of agriculture and the people living in the ag world.
On July 9, 2014, Randy married Kameo Kay Keltner. Loving partners for over 20 remarkable years, Randy and Kameo blended their families, delighting in how naturally family members became less defined by “his” and “hers” and were instead embraced as “ours.” Son Austin (Jill) Cragoe and daughter Kylee (Jacob) Stinson, along with grandchildren Jersie, Harper, and Sydney Cragoe and Jackson Stinson gave Randy an endless sense of pride and profound purpose. Always the salesman and entertainer, Randy had a special knack for packaging his famous “life lessons” into witty entertainment, charming his family into musing at his lectures, useless-but-interesting facts, tall tales, pranks, and endless riddles. In his always exuberant “Randy style,” he immersed his family in his many traditions, including his five Christmas trees, yearly pilgrimage to the Minnesota State Fair, and trips to watch Twins baseball.
Self-employed and semi-retired for the final five years of his life, Randy found himself trading his business suits for flannel, worn jeans, and power tools. He dropped the business meetings and took up world travel with Kameo; the two of them embarked on numerous extended vacations across the U.S., the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. Randy kept pace with the corporate hustle, but now it was to pursue his own passions on his own terms. He bustled from one project to another almost as if he knew the time he had would never be enough to complete and experience everything on his docket. He built basement bars and cleared the overgrown grove behind his house. He built and remodeled and painted and planted in his unique “Randy style” of doing things, all abiding by his motto to “leave it better than I found it.” His family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues can all attest to him leaving us better than how he found us.
Surviving is his wife, Kameo; son Austin (Jill) Cragoe of Sioux Falls, South Dakota; daughter Kylee (Jacob) Stinson of Ottumwa; four grandchildren, Jersie, Harper, Sydney, and Jackson; sisters Pamela (Doug) Miller of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Peggy (Scott) Adams of Luverne, Minnesota, and Wendy (Kent) Klemme of Apex, North Carolina; two brothers-in-law, Kyle (Jennifer) Keltner of Chicago, Illinois, and Kasey (Jennifer) Keltner of Columbus Junction, Iowa.
Randy was preceded in death by his parents.
A celebration of life is planned for a future date. Reece Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
