Climate Effects On Farm Animals

Drive from Jos down to Yola in February and the change is obvious to any traveller: cool, dry harmattan mornings give way to a heat that makes the tarmac shimmer by noon. Farm animals feel that same swing far more sharply than we do, because their productivity, not just their comfort, rides on it. A dairy cow that milks well in a Jos morning may go off her feed by afternoon; broilers packed into a poorly ventilated shed in Lagos in April can lose a week of growth in three hot days.

In this lesson you will learn the climatic factors a stockman must watch, temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind and solar radiation, and the single idea that ties them together: the thermoneutral zone, the comfortable range in which an animal spends the least energy regulating its own body temperature and performs at its best. You will see exactly what goes wrong on either side of that zone, heat stress and cold stress, and why an indigenous White Fulani cow shrugs off a Kaduna afternoon that would knock the appetite off an imported dairy breed.