​New Bruce County 4-H Showing and Fitting Club wraps up for the year

The new Bruce County 4-h Showing and Fitting Club has just wrapped up for the year.

The club held its first meeting, May 4, at Hodglynn Holsteins, just outside Bervie, where the focus was on teaching the members how to prepare dairy heifers for the show ring.

There are a lot of steps to getting animals ready for showing, from how, and what, you 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, club leader Molly King demonstrated how to clip a calf’s main body area. Using a calf provided by Hodglynn Holsteins, Molly showed the members 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 of Elmira explained to the members about feeding their heifers. He has spent years getting cows and heifers ready for the ring. He said getting their calves to eat and adjust at a show, begins with how they feed the heifers at home. Once he finished, the members got out their clippers and went to work practising 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 practised 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 calves, in order to make their movements in the ring not stand out and distract from their heifers. The members spent a couple of hours practising all 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, 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, he 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 the main points that heifers get judged on in the ring.

These steps are some of the most important and difficult when clipping show heifers. If you leave too much hair, it will give the calf an unnatural and messy appearance. If you take too much off, the calf’s faults will be obvious in the ring, hurting your placing in your class. Kyle told the club the key to mastering these steps is a lot of practice. Once he was done with the demonstration, he helped the members as they practised clipping and blending hair.

The fourth meeting was held at Nor Bella Acres, near Armow. By now, the members had been shown all the different points of clipping, and this meeting was more about practising the skills they had learned. For this meeting, the club worked on toplines. Members carefully clipped the calves' toplines until they were wedged down to a fine point, making the calves appear to have straight and level backs.

The club returned to Hodglynn Holsteins for the final meeting, July 13. The focus of this meeting was for the members to show what they had learned during the meetings. Each member was given a calf to clip. This was a full-body clip, starting with a calf that had not been clipped before and preparing it until it is ready for the show ring. Clipping a calf takes time and has to be done carefully but when done right, it can make a heifer stand out and look stunning in the show ring.

With the meetings and teaching finished for the year, the club members are looking forward to the upcoming show season, as a chance to use and improve the skills they learned club.

The Bruce County 4-H Showing and Fitting Club’s achievement day will be held at the Kincardine Fall Fair, Aug. 31. The club gives a massive thank you to Jason Martin, Laura Phoenix, Kyle Stockdale, Nor Bella Acres, and Hodglynn Holsteins for their assistance this year.