If the cows are a vital food source I imagine losing one is one to many. It is a rather creative idea though, if it pans out they should go for it.

The lady may not have cut her hair in thirty years but there's no hair on her head that's thirty years old. The hair on people's bodies continually sheds and replaces itself in cycles. Like every four to six months your eyebrows and eyelashes are all brand new, your body hair anywhere from two to four years and the hair on top of your head can grow eight to ten years. Your hair grows and average of one half inch a month, this can accelerate during the summer months, it's speculated that during the summer months when the top of your head is exposed to more sunlight you get an increase of blood flow to the head to protect your skin from sun burn, blood helps nourish and grow hair. That's why if a woman plucks hairs from her face over the the years the hair grows thicker. We don't think of it as an injury to the skin but the skin does and blood rushes there to try and heal it, that's why the skin turns red, the increase of blood flow provides more nourishment to the hair. The same is said when men shave, it's the constant friction upon the skin that stimulates blood to the surface, hence over the years the hairs thicken. If you ran your finger repeatedly across your skin it eventually will turn red as you are irritating the skin and, once again, the blood goes there to try and heal the irritation. So at one half inch an year or more over a period of ten years your hair can be over five feet long. If you look closely at her braid you can actually see the growth cycles in progress in terms of years as you see the ends sticking out of her braid. People can have thousands of hair follicles to a square inch on their body, each follicle set to grow hair at different stages known as anagen, catagen and telegen. In the anagen stage hair is actively growing, in the catagen stage it is in it's midlife and the telegen stage is the shedding stage. The telegen stage is the stage we find are the one's we often end up pulling out of the bathtub drain. If you look at a ladies hairbrush you will find most don't have a bulb at the end, those are telegen shedding stage, if you pull some hairs off your head and they have a full light bulb shaped bulb on the end that is the actively growing stage of anagen, in the catagen stage that bulb would look withered.

Now you are schooled in hair growth and have a prime picture to see all the stages.