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[Dorfus]

Well, feeling somewhat confused as most of my dwarves have recently died to carp. It all happened rather quickly as I'd run out of booze. My usual plan is, from embark, to make a farm, grow plump helmets and whatever other seeds I can, then tell my brewer to brew and my cooker to cook on repeat. Turns out this time I must have brewed or cooked everything and had nothing left to make booze with, so everyone rushed off to the river.

Is there any way to manage how many seeds or plants or whatever you currently have and are available for use? Ideally I'd like the farms and food to be self sustainable without me having to keep pressing enter to trade for a few hundred pages of plump helmets.

If not, is there a good farm plots to dwarves ratio I can work with to try to make sure I don't underdo it again? I had one 8x8 plot and a full time farmer this time around.

[Skorpion]

Self-managing farms?

Well, a single 5*5 plot works fine until you get a few dwarves. Someone has worked out the amount a dwarf eats and drinks, however.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=33365.msg491301#msg491301
Okay, they worked out booze. That's useful.

The wiki suggests a single 5*5 plot, which works fine until you have a significant number of dorfs. Generally, by your second immigrant wave, you should open up another one. At first, just go for plump helmets because they're a good starter food.
Do NOT cook seeds. Do not cook the plants, because that destroys the seeds.
Set up a few cage traps outside and build a kennels, so you can catch and tame wildlife. Stone crafts should give you the dorfbucks to buy your first input of livestock, and a few ropes.
Chain up a few females and a male of each species, and cage everything else. Slaughter a few every so often, render the fat, and cook the meat and fat in kitchens to provide happy-making meals.
Set the kitchen menu so you don't cook any plants or seeds, and perhaps set up a farm outside to provide some variety. Do plant gathering to get fruit to get seeds for it, or buy from humans/elves.

After a while, the only management you'll need to do is picking through the animals menu for a few to slaughter, and checking stock levels.

Three 5*5 farms, two inside, and one outside should be plenty of cheap food and brewables, and breed as many animals as possible to get tallow and meat.
The best thing about eating meat? Bone crafts, bone bolts, and skull totems. You're trading food byproducts and the bones of your enemies to get more stuff.

[Zaranthan]

At first, just brew and skip the cooking. Helmets are edible raw, so there's no need to annihilate your food stores. Also, when you do start cooking, use the status menu (Z) to disable cooking Plump Helmets. You don't get seeds if you cook raw plants.

[Poring]

If you cook plump helmets, you won't get new seeds.
Your dorfs probably cooked everything and thus ran out of seeds to plant new plump helmets.

[Smew]

Well, I think a dwarf eats and drinks around 7 times a year, it's probably more than that, but eh.
Anyway, z>kitchen is what you want first, turn off plump helmets and their seeds for cooking, thus you'll never run out of seeds.
Brewing plants produces seeds, cooking does not, and cooking the seeds obviously outright destroys them.
Funnily enough, I use a 5x5 plot for my fortresses entire lifetime, once you have a few legendary growers you'll have way more output than you need.

[Leafsnail]

I brew my brewable plants then make alcohol based foodstuffs.  Minced dwarven beer is surprisingly nutritious, apparently.

[Mount]

In one of my more paranoid fortresses, I built a tiny food stockpile, forbade EVERYTHING but seeds, and when it had been filled, sealed it away behind a lever-operated vault door.

Gabbro door + 3 granite mechanisms = Dwarven tupperware.

[dornbeast]

Well, feeling somewhat confused as most of my dwarves have recently died to carp. It all happened rather quickly as I'd run out of booze.

Under z -> kitchen, there's a menu that allows you to control this.

If you want to set your kitchen on autocook, turn off the option to cook your alcohol.  I can't stress that enough.  I generally forbid cooking of booze in any case, turning it on only briefly if at all.

However, this won't necessarily keep your dwarves away from the river.  I had a wide selection of alcohol in one fort, and I was still losing dwarves to the carp.  Build a well.

[Derakon]

If a dwarf wants to drink but all of the available barrels are currently being held by drinking dwarves, then that dwarf will go look for water. I guess it's better to slake that thirst fast than it is to get the booze. This is one reason it's a good idea to set up a well even if you have plenty of booze.

As noted, it's not worthwhile to cook raw plants or booze. Generally my food comes mostly from dwarven syrup and quarry bushes, with my brewers brewing anything the cooks don't catch. This is a worthwhile, sustainable, and hands-off approach to keeping your dwarves in food and drink.

[Albedo]

All good advice above.

The wiki suggests a single 5*5 plot, which works fine until you have a significant number of dorfs. Generally, by your second immigrant wave, you should open up another one. At first, just go for plump helmets because they're a good starter food.

I go with all 6 starter (UG) seed types, not only for diversity in alcohols, but also because you get a free bag with each type of seed purchase.  And some of the more complex ones allow your dwarves to Mill later on, which is good for their attributes.  (Even Dimple Cups, which are non-edible, just to have them when I want them later.)

I go with a 2x4 or 3x3 plot for Plump Helmets (and Quarry Bushes, tho' those are another "advanced" crop that needs a Farmer's Workshop), and a 2x2 (or 1x4) or 2x3 each of Pit Tails (Ale), Cave Wheat (Beer), and Sweet Pods (Rum).  That, with some odd berries or whatever from early (unskilled) Plant Gathering for AG (Above Ground) crops, maybe 2x2 plots (a bit larger if more valuable, smaller if a garbage crop) and you're set for up to 50* dwarves or more, no prob.

If I can put them all in a line, there are spaces to store the seeds in front of the smaller plots - one tile/seed type, right in front of the crop.

This total is about equivalent to the 5x5 plot - call it ~17 for the PH + QB, + ~5 each for the other 3, = ~32 tiles or so, plus the AG crops.

Don't be tempted to make the farm plots much bigger - it's wasted effort to plant and certainly to harvest, and your stores will overflow with uneaten vegies or oceans of booze.  Which may seem like a good thing now, but it's just a different headache.  (But if you're going to go with a big fortress eventually, plan ahead and leave room for expansion.  You don't want to have to flood your crops later all over again.)

(* Note - this assumes you have a Proficient (+5 levels) Grower.  This helps a LOT, but is not a dealbreaker - just up the size of the farm plots, maybe +50%, no more than double.)

I use the above numbers with a Proficient Grower on embark, and often have ample to cook a bit of PH Wine just to get rid of it.  If I'm lucky on AG crops, various berries that make even more booze, I sometimes allow the largest type to be cooked.  Elk roast with minced plump helmet and quarrybush leaves in prickleberry wine sauce - even sounds good.  But I micromanage, and don't "automate" my foodstocks, admittedly.

[Dorfus]

Thanks everyone, that's been really helpful. Particularly the slaughtering animals bit. I never really put two and two together with that, but I could use the bones rather well. Do the chained males and females need to be near/adjacent or well they breed telepathically?

[Dorfus]

On an unrelated note, the fortress I'm running at the moment is dedicated to the construction of my first ever waterslide and I've just tapped the river. Bonus: the carp are slowly dying

[Albedo]

Thanks everyone, that's been really helpful. Particularly the slaughtering animals bit. I never really put two and two together with that, but I could use the bones rather well. Do the chained males and females need to be near/adjacent or well they breed telepathically?

Telepathically, natch!

One male and many females - or two males if there's a danger of it dieing.

Also, note that newborns are just as large and useful as adults - so if you're still breeding, slaughter all male pups at birth - once you're near where you want to be, slaughter all females, until you reach some equilibrium.

For those that will be slaughtered "later", you can cage them all in one cage (infinite capacity).  They'll grow but ~probably~ won't breed* there.

(* There's some debate on this point - I'm not going to go there, just parrot what's commonly accepted, which could be dead-ass wrong. It's clear that females get pregnant almost immediately, and can certainly give birth in a cage.)

Note that for bones, make crossbows out of small stacks of bones (1, maybe up to size 3, depending), and practice bolts out of large stacks of bolts (5, 7, bigger!).  A crossbow will use "1 stack", regardless of size, but bolts will yield 5x# in stack.  (You'll have to manually forbid one, then the other, and only have one manufactured at a time.)

Consider saving high(er)-value animal bones for moods or decorating. (see wiki, "value").

[Skorpion]

Actually, I cage male offspring, and slaughter them after maturity to get more meat, fat, and bones.

[Albedo]

They used to be the same size at birth as adults - a size 7 animal is a size 7 animal, whether mature or newborn.  Is that no longer the case? (I'll admit I often don't notice things like that.)