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[Tonren]

I constantly find myself running out of food.  I have two farm plots growing plump helmets in every season (and they're both almost always fully seeded), at least 5 dwarves hunting at any given time, but I never have any stores of meat.  Also, it drives me crazy that dwarves will auto-butcher, auto-tan, etc., but I have to manually tell them to render fat and clean fish all the time.  Is there really no way to avoid the manual repetition in brewing drinks, cleaning fish, rendering fat, preparing meals, etc.?  Also, why exactly do I keep running out?  Doesn't matter if my fort has 20 or 120, I never seem to have enough food.  (Or booze.)

[dresdor]

Make sure you are cooking your food in a kitchen.  At low levels this means little, but at higher levels of cooking skill it greatly multiplies the amount of food you have.  That and awesome meals make dwarves happier than yesterday's horse meat.

Also, higher planting skill means a chance to get more than one plump helmet per seed.  Having a dedicated planter is another good way to ensure you have food. 

[Demonic Spoon]

You can make a lot of job orders to render fat or process fish in the jobmanager or simply set each task to repeat.

[Kallemort]

Still, automatic fish cleaning should be a feature.

[RandomNumberGenerator]

I've never had a problem with food. I actually seem to end up with too much food, though I never had a fortress over 40 dwarves. Still, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to supply for everyone if I added a few more farm plots... Here is what I do:

Build a food stockpile near the Dining Room.
Build a kitchen and still near the food stockpile.
Build several farm plots(generally 3x3 or 3x4) to grow pig tails, sweet pod seeds and plump helmets.
Brew sweet pod seeds and pig tails. Plump helmets can be cooked and brewed. Sweet Pods can also be processed into sugar/syrup, which can also be cooked. Have your cook/brewers... cook and brew. Generally I have a single dwaf to all three of these jobs(grow, cook and brew).

I do agree about automatic fish cleaning...

[Jeff Carr]

I always have dedicated planters, a dedicated cook, and a dedicated brewer that start with the maximum skill in those areas, and my biggest problem is running out of barrels and bags for food and alcohol, even when giving ridiculous and unnecessary amounts of it away in trade.

My guess would be that you either are letting most of it go bad before harvesting, or that your planters and cook have very low skill.  If not, I'm not sure what you're doing wrong.  Even one cook, one brewer and a couple of planters can produce more food and alcohol than you can eat in almost any fortress.

I don't brew my sweet pods though, I process them all into syrup then roasts.

[Tonren]

My guess would be that you either are letting most of it go bad before harvesting

How does this work?  I thought dwarves auto-harvest stuff.

[MrFake]

"Just say no" to automatic fish cleaning.  That's a one way trip to miasma town.  When the fish bones and turtle shells pile up, the refuse stockpiles overflow fast, then the butchers and kitties can't get their leftovers into the dumps and you get rot everywhere.

For a while, I had my craftsdwarfs on full steam just to clean out room for all the turtle shells.  Imagine that.  Too many turtle shells.

Besides that, I have more than enough food and booze, but it's still a hassle.  Even with careful stockpile management, I still have problems like too much food crowding out the booze; dwarfs eating plants when there isn't enough food; wiping out an entire vintage because I have nothing else to prepare meals with; and absolutely everyone becoming a damned farmer even though I turned off all dwarfs harvest.  Micromanagement is not a problem with the job manager, though I'd still like to set some options like ratios of ingredients stored, to meals cooked, to booze brewed.

[DeathOfRats]

My guess would be that you either are letting most of it go bad before harvesting

How does this work?  I thought dwarves auto-harvest stuff.

They do, but sometimes they decided that planting new seeds is more important, especially if you have it set to only farmers harvest.

If this is the problem, I'd recommend allowing all dwarves to harvest (

• +[h]) when you see there's a lot of ready-to-harvest plants. Keep in mind that harvesting does give farming experience, so you might end with all your Peasants turning into Planters, and it means the farmers gain experience a little slower (since they aren't doing all the jobs). You can always toggle it back off once the plots are harvested.

[Retales]

The magic words for me are sweet pods and quarry bushes. You need barrels to process sweet pods and bags for quarry bushes (which tends to be a slight problem in the beginning), but once you start processing plants and then cooking them, food will never be a problem.

[Derakon]

Make sure you are cooking your food in a kitchen.  At low levels this means little, but at higher levels of cooking skill it greatly multiplies the amount of food you have. 

What? No. Cooking doesn't increase food stocks. You put in A + B + C + D stacks to make a meal, you get a roast out that has (A + B + C + D) meals in it.

Now, cooking can increase your supply of usable food, but that's only if you're generating things like dwarven syrup or quarry bushes, which it sounds like the OP isn't doing. If all you're preparing is plump helmets, then cooking is actually dangerous, because it destroys the seeds.

That said, preparing syrup and quarry bush leaves is a great way to generate food:

1 plump helmet spawn -> 1 stack of plump helmets -> 1 set of meals
1 sweet pod seed -> 1 stack of sweet pods -> 5x stack of dwarven syrup -> cook -> 5x set of meals

There's an extra step of production that requires a barrel (for sweet pods) or a bag (for quarry bushes), and then you do have to cook the results, but you get five times more meals and they tend to be worth more than eating things raw.

[Skorpion]

Personally, I don't cook plants or fish, other than quarry bush leaves or a kind of fish I have way too much for.
If you're having meat issues, assemble a livestock farm. One male chained up, and a bunch of females chained up nearby. Set the kitchens to cook on repeat, render fat on repeat, and the fisheries to prepare fish on repeat. Close stockpiles stop things rotting near-instantly, and once you have a good stockpile of a few thousand biscuits or roasts, you're good for a while.

Otherwise, buy food off the caravans. Seeds, plants, meat, and fish.

For booze production, get one or two dedicated brewers, keep them supplied with plants and barrels (two underground and one above-ground 5*5 farm plots work fine for me), and monitor stock levels with the Z key.
Accurate stocktaking is a must.

[Beanchubbs]

I usually just have 1 5x5 farm plot that grows plump helmets during spring, summer, and autumn. I don't do winter so that I'll gain enough seeds from brewing/eating for the next year. That usually lasts for 40-50 dwarves. Once I get more dwarves, I set to winter and usually build a smaller plot nearby that grows plump helmets. I cook all things except some booze, turtles, and plump helmets. I have hunters or fishers depending on the map going full boar all the time and if I have fishers, I have 2-3 seperate fish cleaners to process the caught fish. I also buy the food that's 10-20 dwarf bucks from caravans and cook that. I've never had any food problems ever like this.

[Albedo]

I have two farm plots growing plump helmets in every season (and they're both almost always fully seeded)

How big are these plots? How many tiles total? If far from about 40, you either have way too many or way too few.

Also, how many Growers and at what experience ranks?

They do, but sometimes they decided that planting new seeds is more important, especially if you have it set to only farmers harvest.

Ime this usually happens only when you also have your Growers doing a lot of other jobs, like crafts or hauling (other than food, and possibly refuse.)  I start with 1 dedicated Grower, who is usually at or near Legendary by year 2, and then +1 apprentice with the second migrant wave, and another when I top about 50-60 or so.  They have no problem getting the job done, but I also make sure my farmplots/kitchens (plural)/still/F's workshop/dining room/food storage are all tightly grouped, so there is a minimum of long distance hiking involved from one to the other.  Meeting Area (AG) is nearby too - that's a design paradigm that I follow religiously.

Highly skilled Growers get (some of?) the jobs done faster, and so you need less.  A Legendary seems to do a lot more than 50% of the planting once they have an apprentice, especially if they have some Agility.

[Porpoisepower]

Take a look at your stockpiles... are they mostly seeds?  If you don't have enough space for food your dwarves will let stuff rot in the ground.

you may want to consider making some lavish seed roasts(if seeds are infact drowning your stockpiles). This will feed your dwarves and open space in your stock piles for stuff.

Also don't forget that cooked food doesn't need to be stored in barrells and is counted as other under the food stocks.