I've been experimenting with packing together the workflows for my farmers to minimize the length of hauling trips, and I've got a 25 x 35 tile area broken into 35 parcels of 5x5 tiles each. Each 5x5 has either a 5x5 farm (with crop rotation), or a 3x3 workshop centered in a ring of feeder piles, or a 5x5 stockpile. Right now the farms are in two corners, a stairwell leading down into my legendary dining hall is in the center, and the rest of the room is thick with stockpiles for empty barrels, seeds, processed foods, and so on.
I've got a still diagonal from the farm, spitting seeds back next to the field and using plants that come out of the farm. The kitchens are surrounded by meat and fish stocks (they creep off their 5x5 to include walls and doors for miasma prevention), processed plants (syrup, leaves) and milled plants (flour). I have the north farm cranking out "barrel plants" (sweet pods for syrup in one season and then 3 seasons of booze crops) and the south farm on "bag plants" (quarry bush leaves, pig tails for making bags, cave wheat for flour, and either dimple cups or plump helmets in winter to boost booze reserves). The south half is dominated by a thread-and-bag production area; the north half includes a butcher's shop.
Last but not least I've ringed the layout in 5x5 earth-walled rooms for my farmers, with a typical bed/cabinet/coffer allocation to each. Knowing which room is closest to the still lets me decide ahead of time how to meet my brewer's preferences (would he prefer a particular kind of bag to a stone coffer, for example). Later on I can either dig out the walls and replace them with mahogany paneling or stone blocks - to each owner's tastes - or I can install walls in the rooms and shrink them to 3x3.
Has anyone else had success with short-trip or tightly-packed farming arrangements like this? Are there plants that are a "sucker's bet" that I'm stupidly sticking with? Also: if my farming arrangement is so darn efficient, why does my kitchen still have miasma coming out of it every few weeks?