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[Niddhoger]

My production model is basically farmfarmfarfarmfarm and when there is a problem, I send out some herbalists or slaughter an animal or two.

How many total farm tiles do you have and how skilled are your planters? Its actually best to turn off "all dwarves harvest" until you have 2-3 legendary planters.  Harvesting gains skill points but isn't affected by skill levels- only planting is.  So you need to hoard that harvesting skill experience on your planters (who will actually put it to use).  Thus you can go from harvesting 1-3 to 5-7 per plot as quick as possible.  If you don't need to save wood for charcoal, consider making potash as a fertilizer.  If you use fertilizer you might need to reshape your fields.  Fertilizer uses a similar formula to bridges and paved roads.  You want multiples of 4n-1 (3, 7, 11, 15 etc) for maximum efficiency.  I also disable barrels in my seed stockpile (so someone picking up a plump helmet seed doesn't also cancel planting of sweet pods).  If you only get an average of 3 per farm tile, then you are going to need over 100 tiles of farms to provide food+drink for all your dwarves.  I typically farm for booze only, and supply my food through butchering and fishing.  If I use plant food, its derived products (flour, sugar, syrup) so I don't have to worry about cooking up my last seeds.  A line of cage traps throughout the caverns can return massive amounts of food in prepared organs, fat, and meat.  You can even use your military to go slaughter hordes of crundels and other edible beasties (sadly no Troll burgers).  Otherwise, it takes a very long time to get a proper livestock farm going.  Not only do you have to coral 20 of them, but you need to wait a year for hte critter to be fully grown (and ready to butcher).  Sometimes I embark with a handful of sheep.  By the time I need massive amounts of food they -maybe- have bred enough.  In the meantime, they can be milked and sheared for cheese/cloth. 

Consider egg-layers as well.  While Cave Crocs take 2 years to reach full size, they lay about 40 eggs (20-60) on average per clutch.  Pastures some into a room and drop in some nest boxes.  You can lock the door/forbid eggs that you want to hatch while your dwarves eat the rest.  They are worth x4 as much as standard critters, so while you don't get leather from them their bones are -excellent- trade goods.  You get about 80 meat when you butcher a full sized one too.  I think Turkeys are the best domestic bird to get eggs from, although peafowls mature in half the time (better for butchering, worse for egg laying). 

[PatrikLundell]

Fishing:
I've been 100% unsuccessful when trying to create ponds for fishing. I've created both outdoor ponds (filled with bucket hauling), and aquifer ponds, and while they indicate they are fishable (non zero fishing number when designating them as zones), every fishing attempt has resulted in the report that there is nothing to catch in the <direction> swamps. My single successful attempt was a pond/lake created by digging out an area and filling it from an underground cavern lake (with drawbridges to close off the access afterwards to block access by unwanted creatures).

[Niddhoger]

Aquifer "ponds" have to be only one tile in size.  Just make 3-4 of them for 3-4 fishers.  Otherwise you simply cannot create a standalone fishingpond.  The water has to be sourced from somewhere off the map or it won't have fish (murky pools start with some, but quickly deplete).  Fish stocks are non-replenishing on the local level.  You can't just build a pond and count on birds bringing in fish eggs.  That pond would only have fish if it was connected to a river or large lake (again, with edges leading off map).  Both of these reasons are why fishing is rarely a major food source in forts.  Fish deplete too soon, and you have to properly secure part of a flowing body to make it a "renewable" fishing hole.