How to Make a Simple Wheat and Carrot Farm in Minecraft

A hoe of any material, a water bucket (three iron ingots for the bucket), seeds and carrots. Seeds are easy: break tall grass and some of it drops wheat seeds. Ten minutes of clearing grass usually gives you more than enough.

Carrots are harder to find. The most reliable source is a village, where you can harvest a carrot from the farm plots and replant it at home. Zombies also drop a carrot now and then. One is enough to start, because every mature carrot plant gives back several.

Water hydrates farmland up to four blocks away in every direction, diagonals included, as long as the farmland is at the same height or one block below the water. That makes a 9x9 square perfect: dig out the single block in the very centre, pour your water there, and every one of the 80 blocks around it stays hydrated.

Pick flat ground near your base, mark out the square, and use the hoe on every grass or dirt block to turn it into farmland. Hydrated farmland looks darker than dry farmland, so you can check at a glance that the water reaches the corners. If you want a bigger farm, build several 9x9 squares next to each other, each with its own centre block of water.

Right-click the farmland with seeds or carrots to plant them. A neat trick in Java Edition is to plant crops in rows and alternate the crop from one row to the next: a row of wheat, a row of carrots, a row of wheat. Crops planted in the same tight block of one type grow a little slower than crops with a different crop beside them.

Leave yourself a path. A single row of plain blocks or a slab through the middle lets you walk to every plant without stepping on the farmland.

Farmland turns back into dirt if a player or mob jumps or falls on it, and the crop on top pops off. Walking is fine; jumping is not. A fence around the square keeps animals and most mobs out, and a fence gate lets you in.

Crops also need light to grow. A few torches along the fence or between the rows keep the farm growing at night and stop mobs from spawning inside it. Cover the centre water block with a slab or lily pad if you keep falling into it.

Wheat is ready when it turns golden brown, carrots when their orange tops poke out of the soil. Breaking a crop early gives you back only the seed, so wait for the final stage. On hydrated farmland, a planted field is usually ready in about one in-game day and night.

Each mature wheat plant drops wheat and some seeds, and each carrot plant drops several carrots, so you always get enough to replant. Three wheat make a loaf of bread, carrots can be eaten straight away, and both crops are useful for breeding animals: wheat for cows and sheep, carrots for pigs.

Bone meal makes a crop jump forward one or more growth stages when you use it. Skeletons drop bones, and each bone makes three bone meal. If you have a composter, which you craft from wooden slabs, you can also fill it with spare seeds and plant scraps and it will give you bone meal back.

Once your farm is running, the next step is letting the game do the work. A farmer villager will harvest and replant crops on its own if it lives next to farmland, which is the first step toward a fully automatic farm.