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[John Johnston]

My farming and cooking is set up to hopefully increase dwarven happiness:

I'm using three 5*5 fields at the moment.  Two are underground, set to grow sweet pods for two seasons of the year, and the third grows whip vines constantly.

The whip vines are turned into whip vine, which is good quality stuff (sadly, I don't have a source of sun berries to make sunshine, which is the best booze.)  Anyway, it's better than all the other drinks.  My booze stockpile is full to bursting with whip vine.

The sweet pods I process into dwarven syrup.

I also have three farms running (I'm working on expanding this, in the search for the perfect farm animals - I have wolves, grizzly and black bears, a cougar etc. in a pen, but not matched pairs - I wanna farm grizzlies!).  One of them holds cows, another holds foxes (that will be changed), and the third holds giant eagles (they have to be tied down to chains all the time, and the hatchlings need to be caught once they're born ).

When the caravans arrive, I buy all their decent food, and sometimes their booze too.

The kitchens are constantly processing fat and producing roasts.

The end result of this is that the food stockpiles are full of high quality roasts and high quality booze, plus a mix of lower quality foods and drinks.  My reason for doing this is that as the economy is running, I believe a dwarf who cannot afford food will feed themself with the lowest price food available.  If I was farming for plump helmets, there'd be a whole stack of plump helmets in the stores at any given time, so a poor dwarf would eat them constantly and maybe become unhappy.  As things stand however the stockpiles are full of better food but no (edible) raw plants or cheap food, so even a peasant ought to eat well.  Same goes for booze.  Buying in extra good foods means there's a degree of choice, so not everything is a +dwarven syrup roast (75)+.

This setup is sufficient to keep 150 dwarfs going pretty well.  I'm holding ~8000 drinks and ~2000 meals in stockpiles.

(edit)

Incidentally, the "above ground" plots are actually underground.  They have a clear glass roof (bridge) over the top of them (although I don't think the material makes a difference) and function perfectly well.  This makes them safe from wandering skeletal giant eagles, which used to fly down into the farms constantly and peck the farmers to death.

[LegacyCWAL]

How in the hell do you have 40000 of all that food? With such a small farm plot, you'd be losing more to rotting than you would gain by cooking and farming, unless you had about 45 haulers constantly hauling food to a massive stockpile underground.

He said he had a 210-pop fort, so it's been around a few years.  You don't have to farm particularly hard to build up that much excess over the course of several years.

[Soralin]

How in the hell do you have 40000 of all that food? With such a small farm plot, you'd be losing more to rotting than you would gain by cooking and farming, unless you had about 45 haulers constantly hauling food to a massive stockpile underground.

Yeah, that's not too far off, not to mention the constant supply of barrels needed, although all the people hauling do move other stuff around too   http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-3744-whipcaught  My 3 cooks and brewers, each with their own kitchen/brewery, have finally reached legendary, and have managed to overcome the farm production too.

[Firemage]

IMO using potash for fertilizing the field is a waste of good bedmaking material and fuel and a waste of dwarf power.
Legendary Farmers make similarly large plant stacks and all you need is time for them to train their skill.
I always habe a few 3x3 farm plots, depending on the size of the fort and how much clothes I want to make.
I never farm outside, because it's usually too troublesome to defend in a siege.
Plump helmets are my number one crop, followed by quarry bushes (they really produce a crapload of food) and pig tails for the threads.
Th rest I plant, if I feel like it. I usually always have something growing in my farms.