Tutorials/Cocoa bean farming

= Cocoa Bean Farming = So you have just stumbled upon a large Jungle biome and you notice some new things on a slender Jungle tree. What could these little green and brown blocks be? You have just found a few of the new Cocoa Plants! These new additions are the latest farmable plant added to the Minecraft game in the 12w19a Snapshot. For additional information on the plant itself, check out the Cocoa Plant page.

Time-saving compact and cheap design
Planting cocoa beans on the 4 sides of a log makes it harder to replant, so a wall of jungle wood makes the fastest design posible. For a compact design the wall must be also partially underground so as to make the most out of your planting reach. This design uses dispensers, that are cheaper than other design's pistons, and the use of redstone is minimum. The design is modular, with units of one dispenser and 3 blocks wide wall.

This following video shows a functional 4 modules design of this farm:

Full-Efficiency
A large and rather bulky mechanism may be created in a 7x3x7(Length, Height, Width) with an inner stem of three Jungle logs all covered with planted Cocoa Plants. Four three-block tall towers of pistons on the corners of the logs facing the plants with NOT gates connected to the bottom torches may be used to create a peak efficient farm.

Compact
A more compact 3x4x4 mechanism but with 3/4 of the efficiency of the 7x3x7 model may be made with, again, a three Jungle log stem. However, one side of the log stem is connected to Sticky Pistons with a block on the side of the middle piston. A torch is placed under the block and Redstone is placed on top, then a lever is added to the block under the torch. To complete, plant Cocoa Plants on the three remaining sides of the Jungle log stem and wait for them to grow. A flip of the lever and the Cocoa Beans can be harvested.

For Efficiency of space, as jungle wood is very common in a jugle biome, there is no reason to make a farm solely based on wood surface efficiency, the efficiency should rather be of space, and amount of materials used.

Using water as a harvesting mechanism provides a far more compact solution, uses less materials, and can extend the farm beyond the single-column versions seen above. A great example of this type of farm can be seen in MinecraftMaximizer's original design here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iA8odfSwvU