Early weaning is now a well recognized and widely practised system of calf rearing which saves considerable labour compared with the former practice of giving liquid milk or milk substitutes in buckets twice daily to the age of 12 weeks.

One of the practical difficulties of bucket feeding calves twice daily is that the feeding times need to be close to the beginning and end of the stockman's working day to maintain reasonable intervals between intakes of liquid. Each feed must be followed by further time spent washing utensils. The labour demand for this can often conflict with that for milking and feeding other stock. It seemed possible that the whole of the liquid milk substitute intake of calves destined for early weaning might be provided in one feed daily with considerable saving of labour and increase in convenience.