How to Breed Cows in Minecraft (Easy Guide)

Your interactions with passive mobs in Minecraft are much more straightforward than the hostile ones since they don’t fight back. But it’s not always easy to make them do what you want, especially in the case of Minecraft villagers. Some of those passive mobs are necessary, especially in the early game. For that reason, we will be looking at how to breed cows in this article and why you should even do that in Minecraft. We have included a list of items and drops you can get from cows at the end. So, without further ado, let’s moo.

What Resources Are Required to Breed Cows

The only resource you are going to need to breed cows is wheat in Minecraft. You can stumble upon mature, ready-to-be-harvested wheat in village farms. But you can also get wheat by growing it yourself easily. We have a detailed guide on how to plant seeds and grow crops in Minecraft, so feel free to check it out.

With this knowledge, you will be able to get wheat in no time. To breed cows, you need a single wheat per cow, so if you’ve got a whole herd of them, make sure to bring a bunch of wheat.

Where to Find Cows in Minecraft

Cows are common passive mobs. You will find grazing the pastures in pretty much every grassland biome in Minecraft. Usually, they spawn in herds of 2-4 cows, depending on the game version you’re playing. However, the cows don’t spawn in the following biomes: Snowy Plains, Meadows, Mangrove Swamps, and Wooded Badlands.

Another place where you will find cows is in villages. Learn how to find villages in Minecraft via the linked guide. Sometimes, villages can generate animal pens, where you can find cows in addition to some other passive mobs. Furthermore, they may spawn in the butcher’s house pen as well.

If you’d like to transport cows from one location to another, you can just hold wheat in your hand in front of them, and they will follow you. Alternatively, you can use Minecraft boats or minecarts to do the same action more quickly.

Breed Cows in Minecraft: A Step-by-Step Guide

With the basics out of the way, you are now ready to breed cows and give birth to a calf in your Minecraft world. Here are the steps you need to follow:

• Place wheat on your hot bar in Minecraft and select it.
• Walk up to a cow and right-click it. You should see heart particles appear above their head.

• Then, do the same thing with the other adult cow. You will see heart particles above their head as well.
• After that, you will see the cows getting close to each other. Some more heart particles will appear, and then a calf will spawn, as well as a bit of XP for you.

• If you have extra wheat, you can always feed the calf by right-clicking it with the food selected.

Small green particles will appear above its head, indicating the wait time for it to grow into an adult cow was shortened a bit. Furthermore, all mobs have a certain cooldown between breeding sessions. So, you will need to wait for a few minutes to breed the cows again.

Now, if you want to keep the calves in their young state forever, feed them a Golden Dandelion to pause the aging process. This is introduced in the Minecraft 26.1 update, and you can simply craft them using a single dandelion and 8 gold nuggets.

Why Are Cows Useful in Minecraft

Cows can provide you with multiple resources in Minecraft, and here we have listed all them below.

Raw Beef & Leather

After you kill a cow in Minecraft, it can drop beef and leather as well as XP. Using the looting enchantment on your sword in Minecraft will increase the number of drops to up to 6 beef (or steak if you also have a fire aspect on your sword) and 5 leather.

Beef can be cooked in a furnace, or even a smoker, and it becomes steak, one of the best food items in the game. Whereas leather is a crafting ingredient in several useful recipes. You can also sell it to leatherworker villagers and make a ton of emeralds, so you can buy other goods.

Cow’s Milk

Apart from their drops, cows can yield milk. To milk a cow, you will need to make a bucket in Minecraft. Then, simply right-click the mob with the bucket, and it will fill up with milk. Milk can be incredibly useful, especially while raiding an ocean monument or when fighting pillager patrol captains.

Drinking milk will immediately remove all the status effects one has applied at the time. However, keep in mind that all effects count, both positive and negative. So, choose the right time to drink milk. Also, milk is a necessary ingredient for making a cake, a food item, and a sweet decorative block.

So, there you go. Now you know how to breed cows and get milk in Minecraft. Would you like cows to have some more variants or maybe have other functions? Let us know in the comments below!