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[SirWilliamIII]

Here's my way of doing it.

On embark I remove everything useless (like buckets, splints, etc.) and I always embark with 3 proficient miners, a woodcutter, mason, carpenter, and mechanic.
All of these are proficient in their trade. All my remaining points I spend on booze and food, usually stocking me up with about 200 units of each.
I then upon embark start carving out my legendary halls, not worrying for a second about my food production. From moment one I put my mechanic to work to spam out his works of mechanistic art.
Soon as the first liason arrives to my fortress I make an import agreement on which I set all the food/booze units on maximum priority, and use the mechanisms to buy out the entire caravan with ease.
I'm currenty in year 5 or something with 7000 units of food and 4500 units of booze, and 1500 plants still being processed into booze.

Using this strategy I have never had to worry about producing food, other than setting up kitchens and stills, and have been able to focus on other things I find more interesting.

At some point I usually set up a 11x11 plump helmets farm and assign 15 useless migrants to it, I now have 15 near-legendary growers and a never ending supply of plump helmets, and ofcourse Dwarves complaining about drinking the same old booze all day long...

tl;dr Bring lots of food from embark and buy loads of it from the caravans, setting it's priority high in the import agreement.

[Verjigorm]

First, Lots of farms and farmers isn't necessarily the best thing to do.  You always plant one seed, but the greater a dwarf's skill the planter has, the more plants are harvested.  The trick is to turn plant gathering off for all dwarves, except your starting grower.   He get's to plant and grow, even if you have other food sources.   I generally set up my farms to be 3x3 rooms arranged around another 3x3 room with a seeds stockpile(no barrels, just bags).   Set up two of these nodes, and you've got plenty of farming for dwarves.  Two growers work wonders.   

Turn off cooking for plump helmets.   Set up a full time brewing operation.   There is no such thing as too much beer.  Never.   You can never, ever have enough.   That should eat your supplies quite well.   Protect your planters:   their skill is going to be slowly acquired, and it's invaluable for giving you a source of food that will be available even if you are cut off from the outside world by something horrible.   HORRIBLE.

Trade for food.   It's awesome.   If you can make it to the first caravan, you're ok.   Make a bunch of wooden screws or spiked balls.   Sell them.   Sell stone spiked balls to the elves.   Buy their ingredients.   Cook it all up into LOAF and serve it to those mewling dregs.  You should be able to import most of your food, and be able to stockpile large amounts.   Requires you to trade. 

I think the posters about Turkeys are spot on.  They spit out eggs, and eggs are great for keeping your dwarves fed.  Actually breeding them gets a little annoying, but given the return on the eggs, it's not a bad idea to set up some side pens where you can put a hen and let her incubate dem eggs.   The leather and meat thing is a side deal.

Oh yeah, buy and slaughter animals.  They are delicious.  And you get free cages!  whatever, just butcher'em and profit.   Also, you need to have bones incase a dwarf get's that gleam in his eye and wants to make something.  Whatever, it's food. 

Have good cooks.   They make more food out of the ingredients.   Lavish meals will eat up your stocks unless you have great cooks. 

MY rough rule of thumb is atleast 10x as much food as you have dwarves.  7 dwarves need 70 meals.  Unprepared food needs to be about twice that number.   Booze needs to be atleast 20x dwarves.   And keep in mind, wee dwarves need their booze too! 

[vjmdhzgr]

Turning off plant harvesting isn't necessary, it just makes the planters get more experience which doesn't matter if they're already experienced and you risk losing some crops that don't get harvested in time so definitely turn it off once your planters are skilled, and decide for yourself if the experience is woorth the slower harvest time. Also as many before have recommended, herbalists are great early on. I always embark with a dwarf who has 5 points in herbalist for before my farms are set up and 5 points in farming for afterwards.

[Niddhoger]

I'm still trying to fathom how 90 units of farmland can fail to feed 30 dwarves.  30 dwarves only eat 240 food a year.  This seems massive until you realize a skilled grower can probably get 3 per season.  30 tiles with a skilled grower probably feeds that and has enough left over for booze production AND a surplus.   

How many farmers do you have? If you only have one, you are likely seeing food rot in the fields.  Farmers must also have "food hauling" enabled or they won't touch their crops.  If you turned off ALL his hauling labors, this would be a huge issue.  The other point is that if your stockpile is full (or you don't have a FOOD stockpile) there is no where for your food to go, so it'll just stay in the fields. 

[Skullsploder]

What Niddhoger said. I think your issue is that your food stockpile didn't exist or you had a combined food and booze stockpile that was too filled with booze for any plants to go in it. Dwarves won't harvest plants unless there is an open plant stockpile tile to place it in. You should always have a stockpile for each type of food: meat, eggs, plants, booze, fruit, processed stuff like flour or leaves, and of course prepared meals, should all be different stockpiles to ensure that production doesn't bottleneck. You may also have cooked all your plump helmets. This is a bad thing because cooking doesn't produce seeds, meaning that after a while, your planters won't have anything to plant. At least in the early years, you should definitely disable plump helmet cooking in the z screen. Brewing is fine because it produces seeds.

[k33n]

I forgot to mention I have about 30 dwarves at that point. I am growing plump helmets all four seasons, so thats not the problem...

I have fed over a hundred dwarfs on plump helmets alone with two big farm plots.

The posters above me are correct, something is very wrong.

[FallenAngel]

My way is to have at least 1 farm plot made able to grow surface plants through channeling and reflooring.
I also use 5x5 plots.
Harvest things from the outside to eventually get seeds to make farms that grow surface plants reasonable.

[Zac]

I also go for the 5x5 "plump helmet madness" pattern. My plump helmet stockpile usually reaches its critical mass by the end of the third season. Then a chain reaction occur and everything return to nothingness where it came from. Except the void is purple now.

More seriously, the problem probably come from the logistic behind your food production. Check if barrels are allowed in your food stockpile, if you have enough people to haul everything, enough people to grow everything, if the cooks aren't cooking the seeds, that kind of things.

[FallenAngel]

I typically disable cooking of Plump Helmets so at least one food product's seeds are common.
The stills outpace the cooks by a mile, though, so not much is lost.

[Itnetlolor]

When it comes to fresh goods, I wait until I have at minimum anywhere above 75 of an item before I allow cooking (from a dedicated Legendary Chef) of them to be started; otherwise, if brewable, I leave it for that, until the numbers are right for cooking. Over time, it really provides a high yield of cooking variety. Same could be said about drink types before setting them for cooking, and in other cases, seeds when they're in overabundance. Maintains numbers, minimizes rot, and maximizes variety and foodstuff stocks; especially of the prepared variety. Preferably lavish types. Excellent for trade seasonally (depending on frequency).

[JRHaggs]

Try smaller farms.

A couple of reasonably skilled farmers can support huge fortresses with a fairly limited number of farm tiles. You can always expand them later. Especially if your farmers are also brewers or cooks, smaller plots can be helpful. They'll actually get around to cooking and brewing if they don't have to keep planting the fields.

And as noted above, keep your container stocks up. Rock pots are huge. Both food and drink are stored in them, so they serve dual purposes. And you should have plenty of rocks lying around.

You have seed cooking/eating off and brewable plants set to not be cooked, right?

Pigs are awesome. You can stick them in a rock room and they'll flourish. They're like poultry. It takes a while for them to get going, but, coupled with egg production, they'll keep you well fed.

Other things (some already noted above):

Get a farmer's workshop going along with your still and kitchen. Mill too, for that sweet, sweet rock nut paste.
Don't forget that you can forage for plants on the surface/in the caverns.
Oh, and bees, the most important part of any fortress.

[Peradon]

Ok, I think I found my problem. I had plump helmets being cooked, so I ended up having no seeds. When I was running out of booze, brewing got canceled due to no empty containers, and I didnt notice. So, the containers would be filling with food. Then when I turn brewing back on, it doesnt stay on for long, either because I cooked all my helmets or because I had one empty container. Thanks to everyone for helping me figure this out!

[Niddhoger]

Ok, I think I found my problem. I had plump helmets being cooked, so I ended up having no seeds. When I was running out of booze, brewing got canceled due to no empty containers, and I didnt notice. So, the containers would be filling with food. Then when I turn brewing back on, it doesnt stay on for long, either because I cooked all my helmets or because I had one empty container. Thanks to everyone for helping me figure this out!

Keep in mind that empty barrels in your food stockpile CANNOT be used for brewing.  Let me repeat: empty barrels in a "food" stockpile CANNOT be used for brewing.  If you make a small 20 tile food stockpile, it'll keep 20 barrels by default. At first this will usually be 15+ empty barrels along with a few partially filled ones with meat, prepared food, plants, etc.  So... if you make a huge food stockpile and don't manually reduce the "reserved" barrel count, then all your barrels will be caught up in your stockpile and unable to be used for booze.  Then, since you can' brew anything, it all gets cooked up and hte seeds destroyed.  Basically, you need to reduce the barrels/pots in your initial food stockpile and set up a barrel/pot only furniture stockpile near your brewer, and then link that pot stockpile to said brewer (along with a plants/fruits stockpile).  Once you see loose stacks of food clog up your stockpile, you can start increasing the barrel count back up.  Early on though, you can't afford to have the first 20+ barrels you make just sitting pretty collecting dust. 

You mentioned creating a large "everything" stockpile.  Don't do this.  If you must, make a temporary one to bring everything inside from your wagon, but destroy it and create smaller specialized stockpiles asap.  Otherwise, it just creates longer travel times for your dwarves to carry items too/from.  You also have less control over what goes into it.  You might find it filling up with furniture and tools and run out of room for food.  Maybe you got behind on bins and you have 20+ tiles crammed full of crafts.  Then since its 120 odd tiles large, it probably sucked up 50 barrels.  You are better off making smaller, more specialized stockpiles near each workshop.  Workshops tend to come in chains/groups, so not all of them need to be in the same spot.  Your forges don't need to be adjacent to your farmer's workshops.  You don't need your brewer walking over lumps of ore on his way to pick up some quarry bushes.  Then he has to go to the other side of the pile (past the mountain of bone crafts and step ladders) to nab a free bag.  Just put the ore stockpile near your forge and your bag/process plant stockpiles near a farmer's workshop. 

[utunnels]

I didn't know that, but I never reserved any barrels and I never ran out of barrels.
Maybe I made lots of them.

[catastrophy]

Food and drink piled into one stockpile compete for conatainers and that is sometimes hard to figure out. I often split food and drink stockpiles to see where any problems might occur. And having more rock pots never hurts (especially when you can store them in a quantum stockpile anyway - the days I had huge rock pot storages are finally over).