How to Build an Automatic Chicken Farm in Minecraft

An automatic chicken farm keeps a group of chickens over hoppers, sends their eggs into a dispenser that throws them, and lets the chicks that hatch grow up under a thin layer of lava. When a chick becomes an adult, its head touches the lava and it dies, dropping cooked chicken and feathers into a hopper. You never have to touch it. It’s one of the cheapest farms in the game and a good first project if you’ve never built anything automatic.

Materials for a chicken farm

• 10 or more chickens (lure them with seeds, or throw eggs until you have enough)
• 4 or 5 hoppers, which is 25 iron ingots, the biggest cost
• 1 dispenser
• 2 chests
• 1 lava bucket
• a few slabs, some glass and building blocks
• a simple redstone clock (an observer pair or a comparator clock)

How the farm is laid out

Think of it as three parts stacked next to each other.

The breeder pen. A small enclosed floor made entirely of hoppers, with your chickens standing on top. Walls of glass keep them in. Eggs drop onto the hoppers and get pulled in automatically. Chain the hoppers so they all feed into one line that leads to the dispenser.

The hatching cell. The dispenser faces into a 1×1 cell with a bottom slab as the floor. When the clock fires the dispenser, it throws an egg into the cell. About one egg in eight hatches. In the block directly above the slab, place a lava source, with blocks or signs around it so it can’t flow out.

The trick is height. A chick standing on the slab stays below the lava. An adult chicken is taller, so its head reaches the lava when it grows up, about 20 minutes later. It burns, and because it died from fire the meat drops already cooked.

The collection hopper. Under the slab cell, a hopper (it pulls items through a slab) leads into a chest. Cooked chicken and feathers end up there.

Test it with one chick before you scale up. If adults survive, the lava is too high; if chicks die, the floor is a full block instead of a bottom slab.

Making it run faster

More chickens means more eggs. Chickens lay every 5 to 10 minutes each, so 10 chickens feed the cell steadily and 20 to 30 keep several cells busy. Don’t overdo it: crowded mobs cause lag, and you can only pack so many chickens on a hopper floor before some fall off.

You can run two or three hatching cells off the same dispenser line by splitting the hopper chain.

What you get out of it

Cooked chicken restores 6 hunger, which is decent food you never have to cook. Feathers go into arrows with flint and sticks, and eggs you pull out of the system before the dispenser go into cake and pumpkin pie.

Since 1.21.5 there are warm and cold chicken variants with their own egg colors. They all work in the same farm.

If you want more automation, the same idea of letting the game grow things and collecting them in hoppers shows up in automatic crop farms, and a cow farm is the next step for leather and beef.