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[PatrikLundell]

Currently there is an option to enable Harvesting on all dwarves, or limit it to farmers.
It would be a lot easier to manage if this setting was moved from Options to become a new Hauling item, thus possible to set on individual dwarves. The Options item should probably remain but be renamed and have the function changed to toggling Harvesting on children instead (since their labors cannot be controlled individually).
The trigger pushing me to write the suggestion is that the current implementation has a very negative effect on the efficiency and reliability of miners, because after trekking for 2-3 days to reach the magma sea for a priority 1 digging, they're quite frequently called topside for harvesting before reaching the dig site. It appears mining is the only common job so affected, since Store Own Item jobs are never interrupted on the way to pick up the x¤Pig Tail Sock¤x. This assumption is also supported by the fact that my miners are legendary farmers despite never having farmed, while everyone else, excluding the farmers, are much poorer at farming.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

Miners are called upon because they're at the top of the list (no, really) and their jobs actually involve many small johd, each of which may be followed by a pause to check for any other eligible job, mining or not.

[PatrikLundell]

In 0.40.X it was quite common to see miner trek the way to a digging site, dig a single tile and then return. Now they turn around before even reaching the digging site, so mining seems to be unique in that those jobs can be interrupted when selected and en route, while xsockx hauling gets nailed at the time the job is taken (they can probably be interrupted by DO NOW! jobs, though). While digging jobs can be interrupted by harvesting, they can NOT be interrupted by a nearby higher priority digging job, so if you designate a prio 1 digging of the tile next to the one currently processed, miners typically finish the one they're doing and start to trek across the map to the prio 4 job selected (at the time the current one was started?), rather than new one added before finishing the current dig.

[martinuzz]

I've grown completely used to using the only farmers harvest option, and have never seen a single crop rot on the fields.
Although I must say, I'm a farming minimalist. Eight 2x2 (6 underground, two abovegroun) plots which only grow stuff one season per year produce more than my 50 dwarves need. There's years where I set all fields to fallow even, because, overproduction. Two farmers grow and harvest it all. They even have all other hauling labours enabled.

[PatrikLundell]

You grow more than I do, which is typically one season each of all the brewable surface crops in single tile plots, 1 shared plot for all underground brewables except pig tails, one 3*3 plots for pig tails and shared overground threshables respectively. I normally have a single farmer, but I tend to assign food and refuse hauling (I'd definitely would avoid stone hauling).

[NW_Kohaku]

Maybe I don't babysit as much as I used to, but I remember enjoying the function of all dwarves harvesting because it meant my children would harvest, and actually get some use out of the buggers.  If harvests interrupt jobs, then they must have been at the top of the list, since I saw them doing a lot of it, and I had some children reach legendary farming.  (This was back as far as 0.28, though...)

[PatrikLundell]

I like the general harvest concept (and it almost matches how things worked in the rural society [I think the priest didn't participate, and the nobility certainly didn't]), and with an option to turn harvesting off on children I'd leave it on, but when harvesting causes key dwarves to fail at their primary jobs, I want to be able to relieve them from harvesting, at least for the time spent on those jobs. When digging a 50 tile long single wide corridor down by the magma sea takes months because the miners spend days [Literally. It took 2-3 days in my last large fortress] walking down only to turn around to harvest, the next one then starts its days long trip downwards, gets interrupted by harvesting, the first one makes a new trip and actually manages to chip away three tiles before returning back up to drink... That's when it gets really annoying, especially when you have a fair number of short distance haulers close by who'd harvest a lost faster because they don't have to trek to do it, if the job selection had just been delayed slightly.

As an aside, I've seen long term resident bards harvest, and even trade at the trade depot (any can trade, as my trader was locked up in a pre honeymoon suite), so even those can be of some use.

[NW_Kohaku]

Why would you want to turn the harvest labor for children off? They literally have nothing else to do but eat, drink, sleep, and party.

[PatrikLundell]

I don't, but there are some players who want all the grower skill increases to end up on their dedicated farmers.

(And, just to be snarky, dorfs don't party anymore. Kids engage in the even less useful activity of playing [at least partying caused them to get to recognize the beards of the score of dorfs they grew up with]).

[Button]

+1 to the suggestion.

Btw, children harvesting seems to have become much less common since 0.40 - I think the game takes their personalities into effect.