A bone meal farm.
A bone meal farm can be created by connecting a farm of choice to a composter via a hopper or minecart with hopper, to produce bone meal, or using a skeleton farm, since skeletons drop bones, which can be crafted into bone meal.
Most plant farms can be used to generate bone meal. The most efficient farm types to connect the bone meal farm with are melon slice or cactus farms, as either can generate a lot of bone meal per hour if the farm is big enough. Additionally if you have other farms you can make leftovers, such as seeds go into the composter.
Using a composter
Right-clicking a composter is inefficient. Luckily, the game allows us to connect a composter to a hopper: add a hopper on top of the composter to make a queue of items, and add one at the bottom to keep it running after it gets full by collecting the bone meal.
Composting spreader
Front view
This is a design that uses parallel composters. When you have an efficient upstream farm, this is what you need.
Items can be inserted into the composter by placing a hopper on top of a composter. The farm starts by adding unwanted compostable items into the chest on the top left (see picture). The items in the chest occasionally drop into a minecart with a hopper that travels along a track over the hoppers above the composters. The items are taken out of the hopper minecart and into the composter, and composted automatically. When the composter is fully fertilized, the bone meal is taken into the bottom chests.
Alternatively, you can do without a rail by using a large chest with two hoppers below, connected to two different composters. The hoppers divide the input evenly. You can even scale this up to connect to another level of chest-spreader, so you can have 4, 8, 16... composters running in parallel.
Villager
Make a crop farm and lock farmers in it. Place minecart hoppers under each block of farmland. The hopper minecarts should funnel the crops into hoppers, which point downward to composters. Under the composters should be more hoppers that point to a chest.
This farm requires much iron and wood, so you should make an iron golem farm and have a large supply of wood. See Tutorials/Iron golem farming.
A farm by Chapman
Bone meal gambling
Bone meal gambling is an unusual way of farming bone meal, and it relies on iron input:
- Right-click grass using bone meal. This generates flowers and grass.
- Shear all the grass and flowers.
- Insert the compostable items into a composter farm as seen above.
- Collect your bone meal. There is a 98% chance of regaining the original amount of bone meal as before and a 2% chance of regaining the original amount plus an additional layer in a composter.
Note: If your composter farm has more than 1 composter, you may need to start off with more bone meal. For example, if the farm has 5 composters, you would need to start off with at least 5 bone meal. (You may need a few extra)
Skeleton farm
A skeleton farm can produce bones, which can be crafted into bone meal, as well as other stuff that skeletons drop, such as bows, arrows, and armor.You can also gain XP from them. For more information, read Tutorials/Spawner traps and Tutorials/Mob farm. A spawner trap is the most efficient, because only skeletons spawn:
- Find a dungeon with a mob spawner that spawns skeletons, or build a dark place for the skeletons to spawn. Note that zombies, creepers, and spiders can spawn too in the latter option.
- Make a water stream for the skeletons to fall down to where you want to kill them.
- Kill the mobs yourself, with a mob grinder, etc. to get their drops and XP.
You may put a hopper below the block where the mobs die, so you can collect their drops and put them into a container, or an item sorter.
Nylium-based automatic bone meal farm
In Bedrock Edition it is possible to make a profit from bone mealing crimson nylium. The nylium block produces crimson roots and nether fungi in a 7x7 square area around the block that was bone mealed. Collecting these nether plants and placing them in a composter on average yields a bone meal profit. This process can be automated by moving the nylium platform with pistons to break the nether plants. The plant items can then be collected, typically using a water pickup system. from the top of the Nylium platform and fed into a series of hoppers above composters.
The automated bone meal farm shown below utilises this method to produce a profit of 7,800 bone meal per hour.