Minecraft: Chunk loaders without the use of spawn chunks?

I'm currently playing on a server in Minecraft and I want to make an offline chunk loader so my auto farms will still work. I've searched around the Internet and came up with only chunk loaders that rely on the spawn chunks. But no one has mentioned chunk loaders without the use of spawn chunks, not even to say that there isn't one out there. So I'm curious to see if there's one. (The reason I'm not using the spawn chunks is that it's built over and I'm about 4000 blocks away.)

Get one of the zombies that can pick up items, and give them an item. That zombie becomes persistent, and loads a few chunks around it. So contain it, and you got a chunk loader.