Food farm in Minecraft

Food is the foundation of survival in Minecraft. Without it your hunger bar empties, you can no longer sprint, and once it hits zero you start losing health. Hunting animals and growing crops by hand is enough at the start, but as your base grows and your expeditions get longer, an automatic food farm becomes a must. It's probably the first farm you should build, even before the XP farm or the iron farm. If you're only just getting started, check our getting started guide, which walks you through your first nights.

Wheat farm with a farmer villager

The simplest fully automatic food farm uses the behavior of a villager with the farmer profession. A villager that claims a composter (the block for composting plants) automatically becomes a farmer and gains the ability to plant and harvest crops. The trick that makes the farm work is that a farmer collects more crops than it needs and tosses the surplus to other villagers. We intercept that surplus with hoppers.

The build is simple: make an enclosed field, say 9x9 blocks, with water in the middle (for irrigation) and hoppers hidden under the blocks of dirt. Put the farmer on the field with a composter and a supply of seeds. The farmer plants and harvests wheat automatically, and you collect the surplus with hoppers into chests below. You can then craft the wheat into bread (3 wheat = 1 bread) or use it to breed cows.

A single farm with a farmer and a 9x9 field produces roughly 200-400 wheat per hour, which works out to 60-130 loaves of bread. That's plenty to keep one player fed, even with heavy exploring and fighting.

Carrot and potato farm: a better alternative

Carrots and potatoes beat wheat in several ways. First, carrots can be eaten straight off the field with no processing, and baked potatoes restore 5 hunger points, the same as bread. Second, each harvested plant drops several items, so the yield per field is much higher than with wheat.

The farm works exactly like the wheat one: the farmer plants, harvests and tosses the surplus. The difference is that carrots and potatoes are both the seed and the crop, so the farmer doesn't need separate seeds. Just give it a few carrots or potatoes to start with and everything else happens automatically.

If you want to bake the potatoes automatically, add a hopper system leading into a furnace with an automatic fuel supply (for example from a wood farm or bamboo blocks). Baked potatoes are one of the best food sources in the game: easy to mass-produce and they restore a solid amount of hunger.

Chicken farm: fully automatic meat

The chicken farm is a classic of food automation in Minecraft and one of the most elegant farms in the game. The mechanic is clever: chickens stand on hoppers that collect their eggs. The eggs are carried to a dispenser that shoots them out automatically. Each egg has a 1/8 chance of hatching a chick. Baby chickens drop onto a slab next to lava (too short to reach it), and when they grow up their heads touch the lava and they die, dropping cooked chicken (the lava cooks the meat automatically). A hopper underneath collects the finished, cooked meat into chests.

The build needs at least 20 chickens (the more you have, the faster the production), hoppers, a dispenser, a redstone comparator (to detect the eggs), an observer or a redstone clock, slabs and lava. The whole system takes up very little space and can be built even in a small base. The redstone is simple: the comparator detects eggs in the hopper and activates the dispenser, which shoots them out.

It's a steady, completely passive source of food that needs no input from the player once it's built.

Steak and pork farm

Steak is one of the best foods in the game for saturation: it restores 8 hunger points and 12.8 saturation. A fully automatic steak farm is harder to build than a chicken farm, though, because cows and pigs don't lay eggs and breeding them means feeding them by hand.

A semi-automatic steak farm works like this: you keep cows in an enclosed pen with hoppers in the floor. You feed them wheat by hand (from your automatic wheat farm) so they breed. Once the herd reaches a certain size, a lava system or fire kills the adult animals, and the hoppers collect the raw beef. A furnace under the hoppers cooks it automatically.

Fully automatic variants that rely on how calves grow up also exist, but they're complicated and require an advanced redstone circuit.

Comparing food sources

Which food farm to choose

Early in the game, the best option is a wheat or potato farm with a farmer villager. It's simple, needs no redstone and supplies enough food for everyday needs. Once you've mastered the basics and have more resources, build a chicken farm as an extra, completely passive source of meat.

For endgame players we recommend pairing the chicken farm with a golden carrot farm. Golden carrots (8 gold nuggets + a carrot) have the highest saturation of any food in the game, so you'll need to eat much less often. With a gold farm and a carrot farm you can produce them in large quantities.