Every summer during our county fair, I hear it. "I want a fuzzy calf!" In our part of the world, most livestock shows occur during the spring and summer months. This is not the most ideal for growing and keeping hair on a project calf. There are grumblings of jealousy about the claves who have access to a cooler or cool room. True, they have some advantage to growing and keeping hair when living in a cool room, but the true secret to hair is starting now.
To produce a fuzzy calf, you must understand you need hair growth and it needs to be in the proper condition. Hair growth is the length and type of hair the animal has. When we think of a fuzzy calf, most of the hair is winter type hair. The hair is very fine and dense, which helps to keep the calf warm in winter. A winter coat also has some longer, coarse hairs. These tend to help the calf shed moisture, like rain and snow. Once late spring comes, calves naturally shed the winter coat for a summer coat that is less dense and cooler.
Hair growth is based on five things: light exposure, temperature, nutrition, health and genetics. In winter, there are less hours of daylight and colder temperatures. The calf will grow the winter hair coat described above. Light exposure is more important than cold temperatures. You can have a week of cold early in the fall, and calves will not suddenly hair up. For the same reason, it can be unusually warm in March or even January, and calves will not suddenly shed hair. If less light exposure is combined with consistent cold temperatures, then the best winter coat possible can be grown.
If you have access to a cool room or cooler during the late spring and summer, great. If you do not, you need to try and create an environment that can help keep them cool and out of the light. What has worked best is to have three things available: shade, moving air and moisture.
Shade can be provided by a shed, barn, tarps or shade cloth. The main point is, give your calf a place to get out of the sun. No matter where the shade is, keep air moving. It can be as simple as a cheap box fan, an old ceiling fan or a large blower fan. Just make sure it is blowing hard enough to make the calf's hair move. Moving air helps to blow away the body heat the calf is producing, keeping them cooler. Adding some moisture to the air also helps the cooling effect. Dry is always warmer than wet. Adding a mister to a fan or using a swamp cooler can help cool the calf and the air around them.
One of the best environments I have seen for calves was a three sided shed, built on the north side of a barn. This kept the calves in the shade all day long. The shed had 16 foot square pens for each calf to stay in during the day. Each pen had two fans with misters that blew during the daylight hours. The calves had their hair worked every night and were then turned out to pasture for the night. By the time of their summer fair, the calves had almost as much hair as those in a cool room.
No matter how little light they get, and how cold it is, hair will not grow without proper nutrition. There are several supplements claiming to promote hair growth, but essentially, they are only filling in any possible missing nutrients. If you feed you calf a balanced ration (a subject for another blog), they will grow hair.
The health of the animal can also have an effect on hair growth. Sick or unhealthy calves will not grow the best hair. The animal's body will put the nutrients it would normally use to grow hair to work fighting whatever is making them unhealthy. It could be an infection, parasites or a disease. Sick calves can be identified by their coarse and unhealthy looking hair coats. If you keep them healthy, they will have healthy hair coats.
Genetics is the final factor in hair growth. Some breeds naturally have great hair coats, like the English and continental breeds: Angus, Hereford, Maine-Anjou, Shorthorn and Simmental. Other breeds, like the Brahman and all the breeds with Brahman blood, will not have much of a winter coat. Even some blood lines within a breed will produce more hair than others. There is no great way of knowing what the genetics will be for hair growth, so the most you can do is provide great nutrition and keep them healthy.
Hair condition is different from growth. There are plenty of calves with tons of hair standing in pastures across the country. For the hair to look great on show day, it must be conditioned. Condition is made by consistent hard work. Conditioning the hair coat is about keeping it clean, training it to lay a certain way, and getting rid of dead hair. This does not happen the week before fair! Work with the winter hair they have now! (I will write about how I teach youth to work hair in the next blog).
To review, remember these things: Keep them shaded and cool, feed them well, keep them healthy and work the hair. All the magic supplements and hair products will not fix a bad hair coat. Only your hard work and diligence can make a fuzzy calf.
Scott Stinnett
Extension Associate
Kit Carson County
Golden Plains Area
Colorado State University Extension
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