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A Basic Chicken Farm

Build a pen

You'll need enough wood to make 16 fences (6 logs, 24 planks, or 11 sticks).

Dig a hole, 5 x 5 x 1 block deep.

Place fences all around the edge.

Put a block in the middle.

Fences form a barrier that is 1½ blocks high, so that mobs (or players) can't jump over it.

If you place a block in the centre of the pen, you will be able to stand on it to jump out of the pen, but the chickens won't.

This pen design is easy for you and the chickens to get into from any direction, but only you can get out.

Add Chickens

There are two ways to add chickens to your pen:

Collect Eggs

Each chicken will lay an egg on average every 7 minutes. In areas where there are wild chickens, you'll find plenty of eggs. If you have 20 or so, that's enough for a good start.

Just right-click to throw eggs into the pen. They will break, and one out of every eight will hatch into a chicken.

Collect Chickens

First you need some seeds: you can get these by breaking long grass, or if you are lucky enough to find a village with wheat growing, you will get seeds when you harvest that.

Find some chickens, and if you are holding seeds in your hand, they will follow you wherever you go. As long as you go really slowly, they don't like to rush.

TIP: go chicken-hunting early in the morning: it's really annoying if it gets dark and you have to hurry home to safety and leave the chickens behind.

Once you get the chickens home, just go into the pen and they will follow you in. They will start laying eggs, which you can collect to make more chickens with. Once laid, eggs will vanish after 5 minutes, so collect regularly.

Breed more chickens

If you have seeds from grass or wheat, you can use it to make the chickens breed. Right click on them, and hearts will appear above them. For every two chickens you feed, a baby will be born.

Now for the sad part

At a certain point you're going to have to kill your chickens. Just jump in the pen with your sword out and start hacking. Make sure that you have enough eggs to start over before you go and kill them all!

Cook the chicken and make arrows with the feathers.

Improved Chicken Farm Tutorial

This chicken farm will collect the eggs automatically, and put them in a chest for you, so you don't have to keep going back every 5 minutes.

What you will need

In addition to basic building materials (wood, stone, whatever) you will need a bucket (made from 3 iron) and a hopper (made from 5 iron and a chest), one more chest, and a wooden sign.

Building instructions

Build a 5x5 platform with a hole in the centre.

Place a sign inside the hole (you can write anything you like on it!)

Build up a wall all around the edge

Get 4 buckets of water and pour one in each corner.

The water will flow towards the centre, but it will not go through because of the sign you placed there.
Build up the walls a little higher. A half-slab is tall enough so that you will be able to climb out if you fall in, but the chickens won't.

Place a chest on the ground underneath the central hole.

Place a hopper on top of the chest (to do this you must sneak (hold down SHIFT) whilst placing the hopper, otherwise you will just open the chest).

Now fill up your farm with chickens, by throwing eggs or luring them in with seeds.

The chickens will float about in the water laying eggs, which will be collected into the chest underneath.

Tips

Once you get to the stage of the game where you can make potions, a splash potion of harming is a great way to kill lots of chickens at once.

Farming Sheep, Cows and Pigs in Minecraft

Farming cows and pigs will provide a ready source of meat for food. Cows also provide leather, which can be made into armour, and is essential for crafting books. Cows can be milked by right-clicking on them whilst holding a bucket.
Sheep provide wool, but nothing to eat. Pigs can also be ridden
The same techniques also apply to chickens, but they also lay eggs, which is an easier way to increase their numbers. You can farm chickens the same way as other animals (see the basic tutorial), but you might want to use an improved farm design that collects the eggs for you.

What you will need

Food

The essential thing you will need for farming is food for the animals. Get some of that before you start!
Cows and sheep eat wheat. Pigs eat carrots. Chickens eat seeds (most easily obtained from wheat or long grass, but they will eat any kind of seed).

Wood

You will also want to harvest some wood to construct fences and gates to build enclosures.

How to build the farm

Build an enclosure

First you will want to build an enclosure, either a small pen or a large field, in which to keep your animals. This can be indoors or outdoors, but it needs to be somewhere that you can lead the animals to, so outdoors is easier. If you're raising sheep for wool, you will need a large grass floor so that they can eat and regrow their wool.

Fences and Gates

Fences form a barrier that is 1½ blocks high, so that mobs (or players) can't jump over it. Fences are crafted from wooden sticks, and automatically connect together when placed next to each other. Gates act as a way to get through fences, and are opened or closed with a right-click.
An alternative to gates is to place a block of dirt one block away from the fence, so that you can jump out of the field.

Enclosure design

You can just fence off an area and build a gate to get in and out, but if you build so that the ground is higher on the inside than the outside, then you can make an animal pen that is easy to get into from any direction.

This animal pen can be entered in any direction. The player can either use the gate to get out, or just jump off the dirt block.

Find some animals

Find some animals: you will need two of the same kind to breed. There are no males and females in Minecraft. Hold some of their favourite food out (wheat for sheep and cows; carrots for pigs; seeds for chickens)

When they notice the food, they will look at you and follow you. Lead them back to their new home!
If you built the kind of pen suggested above, it will be easy to get them to follow you in.

TIP: if you're using a gate to exit the animal pen, make sure you equip something other than animal food to stop them from trying to follow you.

 

Animal Breeding

To get your animals to breed, you just need to feed them. Right-click on an animal whilst holding wheat, and hearts will appear above its head so show that it's in the mood. Right-click on another animal nearby, and, well, nature will take its course.

Next something complicated to do with birds and bees and storks and cabbage-patches will happen. Mercifully we don't need to know about all that, we just get to see the results. Awwww!

Until the baby grows up, the adults will not respond to further attempts to make them breed. However, pretty soon you will have four animals that can be bred, and you will quickly be able to raise a large herd.

Slaughter

The most efficient way to harvest meat from your cows and pigs is just to enter the pen, equip a sword and slay all of them except a few that you save for breeding the next herd. If you kill pigs by setting them on fire, then your pork chops will be ready-cooked, but you will have to live with the knowledge that you are a horrible person.

Wool

Shearing

Sheep will drop one block of wool if you kill them, but they will drop more if you right click them with shears. Sheep will regrow wool after shearing, if they have grass to eat, so you can get lots of wool over time.

Dyed Wool

If you want coloured wool, you can dye the sheep first for greater efficiency. After shearing, the wool will grow back the same colour you dyed it. You can, of course, dye coloured sheep white with bonemeal.
If you breed coloured sheep together, the babies will be the same colour as one of the parents, not a mix.