A new 4-H club has finished for the year. The Bruce County Showing and Fitting Club held its first meeting on May 4 at Hodglynn Holsteins, just outside Bervie. The Bruce County Showing and Fitting Club focused on teaching its members how to prepare dairy heifers for the show ring. There are a lot of […]
A new 4-H club has finished for the year.
The Bruce County Showing and Fitting Club held its first meeting on May 4 at Hodglynn Holsteins, just outside Bervie.
The Bruce County Showing and Fitting Club focused on teaching its members how to prepare dairy heifers for the show ring.
There are a lot of steps to getting animals ready for showing, starting with how and what to feed them to teaching them to walk in the ring. At each meeting, the members were taught a different part of prepping heifers.
At the first meeting, Molly King, one of the club’s leaders, demonstrated how to clip a calf’s main body area.
Using a calf provided by Hodglynn Holsteins, Molly showed the club that by clipping against the calf’s hair, they would be able to remove more hair and not leave streaks of hair. This gives the calf a cleaner and smoother looking haircut.
After the demonstration, Jason Martin taught the members about feeding their heifers. Jason Martin, from Elmira, Ont., has spent years getting cows and heifers ready for the ring. He told the members that getting their calves to eat and adjust at a show starts with how they feed the heifers at home.
Once Jason finished, the club members got out their clippers and went to work practicing what Molly showed them at the beginning of the meeting.
The second meeting was held at the Teeswater fairgrounds. This meeting focused on showmanship.
Laura Phoenix, a judge and former champion showman, watched the members as they practiced their showmanship. She gave tips and offered advice on how to improve in the ring.
Laura told the members that they should work in unison with their calf in order make their movements in the ring, not stand out and distract from their heifer.
The members spent a couple of hours practicing all of the different moves they use to set up their calves in the ring.
For the third meeting, the club was back at Hodglynn Holsteins. This time the guest speaker was Kyle Stockdale.
Kyle is a professional fitter who also has a business repairing and selling clippers, blades and showing equipment.
Kyle gave the club a demonstration on how to wedge toplines and blend belly hair.
While he worked, Kyle explained what he was doing and why it was important.
Wedging toplines refers to clipping the hair along the calf’s spine. The idea is to make the calf’s back look straight and level. Leaving the hair longer in any low spots on the calf’s topline allows the fitter to hide any faults the calf has.
Blending the belly hair gives the calf a clean sharp outline and can help shallow heifers appear deeper with more capacity. This is important because capacity is one of the main points that heifers get judged on in the ring. Read More