Tutorials/Meat farming

Animal and Meat Farming
Cooked meats are the best all-around foods in the game, excepting only those crafted with gold. To have meat readily available, one must farm animals. Farming animals also provides several other useful items: leather, feathers, wool, and eggs. A manual-slaughter farm can also provide a fair bit of experience.

Basic farming
A "manual" animal farming is pretty simple:
 * Round up some (at least two) animals into a pen. Fences are classic, and avoid suffocation.
 * Breed them until you have a reasonable number (or they're bursting out of the pen).
 * Slaughter most of them, and profit. Breed some more....

To lead animals around, you need to wield the same food that you can breed them with: Wheat for cows, mooshrooms, and sheep; carrots for pigs; wheat or other seeds (including netherwart) for chickens. Once you've got them into the pen, start feeding them -- as they go into love mode, they'll pair off and produce babies. (They will also produce experience orbs, make sure to collect them!) You can breed the animals about every 5 minutes, getting one young for each two adult animals in your herd. The babies will take about 20 minutes to grow up, so don't slaughter too many adults too fast.

There are natural limits to how many animals you can keep in a given pen -- In particular, if it gets too crowded, animals will be pushed into the walls of the pen. If those are solid blocks, the animals will then suffocate; if the walls are fences, glass, or other transparent blocks, the animals can be pushed right through them, to wander the landscape! Usually the latter is better, since you can always hunt down escapees. Crowding through the walls is a particular problem after breeding, as baby animals can push the adults into the walls.

For sheep, you naturally shouldn't slaughter them, just dye them as desired, and shear them regularly. They will also need a fairly large pen filled with grass, to recover their wool after shearing.

Chickens are a special case, because not only do they breed with wheat seeds, but they also lay eggs, and throwing eggs has a chance to produce chicks. This makes them very easy to multiply in general. The annoyance of having regularly gather the eggs prompted the development of "egg farms", where a flock of chickens are kept on water, and their eggs are gathered by the current to some central place. The recent introduction of the hopper now allows the eggs to be automatically stored, and even brought to a dispenser for auto-hatching.

DJ&Riggaz Automatic Cooked Beef and Leather Farm
Video tutorial is available here. In trying to make an automatic cow farm that actually cooks the meat into beef before the cow dies is a problem that a lot of people face. The big question in this is usually whether to use lava or netherrack. Well personally, I'd believe that using netherrack, as cows are so big allows for the best and most efficient farm. Using a breeding station of some description as the hub of the design, with a water flow from the breeding pen leading to the cows falling onto a single block of lit netherrack at the very end of the water flow, followed by being pushed off from pistons that are underneath the last water block after a few seconds will cause the cow to die in a burning fashion a lot of the time, ultimately giving you beef as well as some leather.