How to build an automatic chicken farm in Minecraft

An automatic chicken farm in Minecraft turns eggs into cooked chicken and feathers while you do something else. Chickens lay eggs, a dispenser throws those eggs into a small cell, the chicks grow up there, and as soon as they’re adult a lava cauldron cooks them. A hopper collects everything into a chest. We built and tested every part of this chicken farm on a Minecraft Java 26.3 server on 27 October 2026, including one design that does not work any more.

What do chickens eat?

Chickens eat seeds. You use them to lure chickens, breed them and make chicks grow faster:

• wheat seeds, melon seeds, pumpkin seeds and beetroot seeds;
• torchflower seeds and pitcher pods.

Two chickens fed seeds make a chick. The parents can breed again after 5 minutes, and a chick grows up in 20 minutes; every seed you feed it takes 10% off the time left. Chickens come in three variants, depending on the biome they spawn in: temperate, warm and cold. They lay white, brown and blue eggs, and a chick from an egg takes the variant of that egg. For a farm it makes no difference. Feeding other animals? See what animals eat in Minecraft.

How does an automatic chicken farm in Minecraft work?

A chicken farm runs on three numbers from the game:

So the farm has two parts. A pen of adult chickens lays eggs, and a cooker turns new chicks into meat once they’re grown. On average a chicken lays about eight eggs an hour, and about one in seven eggs becomes a chick. Twenty laying chickens give roughly 160 eggs and about 22 cooked chicken an hour.

Build it step by step

This is a Java design. It uses a stonecutter as the floor of the cooking cell: chicks are short enough to stand on it under the lava, but adults are just tall enough for their heads to reach into the lava cauldron above.

Part 1: the cooking cell

1. Chest and hopper. Place a chest and a hopper on top of it that points down into the chest.
2. Stonecutter. Place a stonecutter on the hopper. This is the floor the chicks stand on.
3. Lava cauldron. Place a cauldron in the block right on top of the stonecutter and fill it with a lava bucket. The chickens stand on the stonecutter, under the cauldron.
4. Walls. Enclose the cell on all sides with glass or other blocks, including the space next to the cauldron. Since 26.1, chicks can slip through the small gap under a cauldron.
5. Dispenser. Make one wall of the cell, at stonecutter height, a dispenser that faces into the cell.

Part 2: the egg layers

1. Build a small pen where every chicken stands on a hopper, or on a floor of hoppers.
2. Run the hoppers into a chain that ends in the dispenser of the cooking cell.
3. Bring in chickens with seeds, or throw eggs into the pen until you have ten to twenty.
4. Give the dispenser a redstone signal now and then: a simple redstone clock, or a button if you play nearby.

On our test server we put 16 eggs in the dispenser and fired it 16 times: four chicks appeared in the cell. We then let an adult and a chick share the cell under the lava cauldron. The adult cooked and the chest received one cooked chicken and one feather; the chick was unharmed and kept growing.

Cook the chicken automatically

A chicken that dies while it’s on fire drops cooked chicken instead of raw chicken. That’s the trick of every cooker. The catch is lava itself, which destroys items.

We tested the classic design too: chickens on a bottom slab above a hopper, with a lava block above the slab. In 26.3 the chick survives and the adult dies, but the lava burns the meat. Our chest got a feather and no chicken at all. The lava cauldron avoids that, because the drops land on the stonecutter, away from the lava, and fall into the hopper.

• Only Java. In Bedrock, chickens don’t reach into a cauldron like this, so the design doesn’t cook there.
• Raw chicken instead? Leave out the lava and kill the adults yourself, then cook the meat in a smoker. A smoker cooks food twice as fast as a furnace: 5 seconds per item.
• Want eggs, not meat? Skip the cooker and let the egg pen’s hoppers end in a chest.

How many chickens are too many on a server?

Every chicken is a mob the server has to move and check, all the time. A farm that hatches without limits can grow from a few chickens to hundreds, and then the whole server lags. Some limits that work well on a shared world:

• Ten to twenty layers is plenty for a group. More chickens mostly means more lag.
• Mind the crowding limit. In Java, more than 24 mobs in one block space start taking cramming damage (the game rule max_entity_cramming). Spread the layers over several hoppers.
• Don’t run the clock nonstop. Fire the dispenser slowly, or switch the farm off with a lever when nobody needs food.
• Collect the chest. Items lying on the floor despawn after 5 minutes, and a full chest backs up the hoppers.

Lots of farms on one world? Combine them smartly. An iron farm and a chicken farm next to each other give you tools and food from one place. If the server still slows down, Spark shows which farm costs the most time: see find lag with Spark.