Leather is obtained by killing cows, which are bred by feeding wheat to two other cows. My simple field of them created a constant dilemma between how many to kill for instant leather and how many to keep for breeding to create that same dilemma on a larger scale in the next round. Each round took 20 minutes though, which was too long to wait for, while doing other things in the meantime often took longer, thus wasting opportunities to choose again.
It would be so much more efficient to let the cows reproduce exactly every 20 minutes without a visit. My preference was to set up a timer, which is possible for that delay, but vanilla Minecraft doesn't offer any way to feed animals when a signal is given off. Thankfully I did find a plugin adding a trough from which animals can eat and reproduce only whenever their hunger & reproduction cooldown ends, so I installed that as practically the same thing.
I also utilized this spawning mechanism to balance killing for leather with keeping a population to breed, namely through entity cramming. Instead of determining arbitrarily how many to kill, I'll let them breed freely until there are 24 of them in one spot, at which the 25th (or 30th if a lot of them are bred at once) will die automatically and its drops are collected in a chest.
This design is only more efficient than the old field of cows to feed manually if I can add enough wheat to the top chest though, which is still quite a challenge to produce. So I may try to automate wheat production as well. Even then I'll still have to transfer the output of the wheat farm to the input of the steak & leather farm manually and regularly though.
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