What Do Cows Eat in Minecraft?

Cows eat wheat in Minecraft. Holding wheat makes cows follow you, and feeding wheat to two adult cows triggers breeding. Cows are one of the best passive mobs for farming — they provide raw beef, leather, and milk.

How to Breed Cows

• Hold wheat to lure two adult cows together.
• Feed wheat to each cow — hearts appear.
• A baby calf spawns instantly. 5-minute breeding cooldown.
• Baby cows grow up in 20 minutes (feed wheat to speed up).

Cow Farming Tips

• Build a fenced pen to contain your cows.
• Breed cows regularly for a self-sustaining beef and leather farm.
• Use a bucket on a cow to get milk — milk removes all potion effects including poison.
• Cook raw beef in a furnace or smoker for steak (best non-golden food in the game).

More feeding guides: sheep | llamas | camels | armadillos

Breeding Cows

To breed cows, hold wheat and right-click on two adult cows near each other. Hearts appear and a baby calf spawns. The breeding cooldown is 5 minutes. Baby cows take 20 minutes to mature, reducible by feeding them wheat. Each wheat speeds growth by 10 percent of remaining time. Large cattle farms typically keep breeding pairs in 2-3 wide lanes with water streams pushing items to a collection point.

Cow Farms and Drops

Cows drop raw beef (1-3 per kill, cooked if killed by fire), leather (0-2), and 1-3 XP. Raw beef cooks into steak, one of the best food items in the game with 8 hunger points and 12.8 saturation. Leather is used for books, item frames, leather armor, and the bundle item. A simple cow farm pen with wheat breeding produces more steak and leather than most players will ever need. Automated designs use lava blades or campfires at adult height to cook the beef automatically while baby cows walk safely underneath.

Mooshrooms: The Special Cow

Mooshrooms are cow variants found exclusively in mushroom fields biomes. They eat wheat like regular cows but can also be milked with a bowl to produce mushroom stew. A red mooshroom struck by lightning becomes a brown mooshroom, which produces suspicious stew when milked with a bowl. Brown mooshrooms can also be fed specific flowers to change the suspicious stew effect. If you shear a mooshroom, it drops 5 mushrooms and converts into a regular cow permanently.

Cow Farm Design Tips

The simplest efficient cow farm uses a 2-block-high fence pen with a water channel leading to a lava blade at adult head height. Baby cows walk under the lava safely while adults are cooked instantly, dropping steak and leather into hoppers below. This design is fully automatic once you breed the initial pairs. For a more humane farm, use campfires instead of lava — campfires cook the meat without the fire animation and are less likely to destroy drops. Place hoppers under the campfires to collect the steak and leather automatically.

For XP collection, kill the cows manually with a Looting III sword to maximize leather drops and gain cooking XP. Automated farms sacrifice XP for convenience.

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