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[Sashoke]

My fortress has been around for roughly 30 years and we are heavily reliant on the merchants to sustain our large numbers, we cant farm enough to feed the mouths so thats our main source of food. however for the past 3-4 years the merchants havent come! We are all starving! If they dont come soon we'll be doomed. As a side note, we are not enemies with elves (one of the more popular caravans) and for some reason the dwarven liason has been wandering around my fortress for years now! Does that have something to do with it? Please help me!

[Valtam]

Make sure your current mayor/duke/baron doesn't work in fishing or any other time-demanding industry, maybe the liaison has not been able to report your latest demands and treaties.

But, in any case, there are many ways you can sustain your ever growing population, one of them being the formal decrease of such population, building clean-cut facilities like several z-level towers or bottomless cisterns could help you achieving those small goals. It's up to you.

[PDF urist master]

do you have hunters? did you embark on a mountain biome? is there a reason you cannot dig out more space to make farms? do you have farm animals?

if you've already considered these solutions, i suggest offing the less important dwarves via spike trap so you have less mouths to feed.

[Man In Zero G]

The stuck liaison is most likely why the dwarves have not returned. Make sure he can actually find a path out of the fort, make sure your leader isn't too busy to finish the meeting.

Otherwise - have more farmers, farming a larger number of smaller plots. Small plots are more efficient than large farms, you should be able to sustain a massive population as long as everything is planted and harvested in a timely manner by skilled dwarves - one big farmer is not enough, but several small ones that take up the same space can be.
A couple hunters with enough butchers will feed a fortress that has any wildlife at all for years.
Tried fishing? There's almost always fishable water somewhere underground, if you have no other option. And any running surface stream will feed your dwarves forever if your fort didn't get stuck with the "We're not gonna haul the fish" bug.

If nothing else is viable, this is what trappers are for. (starving dwarves will eat vermin, and even non-starving dwarves will occasionally eat a trapped vermin.)

[zzedar]

Have you been getting a lot of sieges lately? Merchants won't come while you're under siege.

It shouldn't be hard to get a lot of food yourself, as long as you're not on a glacier or something. Restrict farming to one or two dwarves, so they can build up their skill. Grow plump helmets all year 'round, of course.

In the short term, maybe you should have somebody gather plants, if you live in a biome with edible plants around and aren't already gathering them.

In the longer term, you might also want to look into animal husbandry. Build a few nest boxes, make sure the eggs are undisturbed, and geese can reproduce extraordinarily quickly.

Let's see... a complete list of ways to get food:

• Farming
• Trade
• Hunting (requires ammo, hunters, and a butcher's shop)
• Plant gathering (requires you to designate the plants to gather)
• Fishing (requires water and a fishery)
• Cooking can turn some inedible things into edible -- tallow being the most obvious example
• Animal slaughtering
• Renewable animal harvesting (milk, honey, eggs)

Anything I'm forgetting?

Edited to add a couple I forgot.