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[PatrikLundell]

does anyone really care that much about losing up on some food?
I always have so huge food stockpiles that I would butcher all my cats hoping that the dwarves and vermin at least have a chance at gobbling all of that up

I certainly don't, apart from the case where I FINALLY managed to buy some exotic ingredient from a caravan to save a dorf that was about to slide over the edge. In that case, however, some random dorf who can't find their favorite food (such as bumblebee eyeballs) would probably gobble it up before vermin got to it anyway (leaving the gigantic mound of locally [over]produced food untouched).

[Atarlost]

It's the loss of seeds that's the issue.  Because seeds are destroyed by cooking and can be crowded out by junk seeds from imported fruits or overproducing seeds for one crop when you have multiple you can wind up with your key crop seeds running out at any production hiccough on a plant subject to cooking. 

[PatrikLundell]

It's the loss of seeds that's the issue.  Because seeds are destroyed by cooking and can be crowded out by junk seeds from imported fruits or overproducing seeds for one crop when you have multiple you can wind up with your key crop seeds running out at any production hiccough on a plant subject to cooking. 

There's one seed cap per species and one in total. I increase the total seed cap to compensate for my fortresses having a huge number of farmed crops. I believe the per species seed cap is 200, and the total is 2000. I change the latter to 10000.
Also, I won't designate plants for cooking if I'm low on seeds for that species (and if I were to perform other kinds of destructive processing [e.g. pressing seeds], I'd again check that there are enough seeds left). Tree seeds are excempt from being spared from cooking, as they can't be planted anyway.

[feelotraveller]

From memory the default cap is 3000.  Increasing the cap gives extra room for manuever but the key is disposing of the 'junk' (any unwanted) seeds.  Trading to caravan, dumping in magma, and auto dump destroy (dfhack) are all valid methods, as presumably although slower would be sending those seeds to a refuse stockpile.

If running out of a particular type of seed plant them (then brew/thresh/etc) to multiply. 

[PatrikLundell]

The problem with disposal of junk seeds is that you're also losing the bags they're in, and bags are in short supply for quite a few years. That's why I've given up and just let junk seeds accumulate to the level that they're disposed of automatically as the species cap has been reached.

I wouldn't use the refuse pile, as the seeds will remain there for a fair while before getting destroyed.

[feelotraveller]

Yes bags can often be in short supply. However it is possible to dump the seeds but not the bag (although extra dwarf labour) or use a refuse pile and periodically auto dump destroy (or atom smash) its contents.

If letting seeds acculumate then the 200 seeds per type limit and/or the 3000 seeds overall cap do need to be changed, since presumably any decent fortress will want more than 15 types of seeds.

Anyway, each to their own, but the main point is that there are ways of dealing with it. 

[Fleeting Frames]

It wouldn't be hard to add a dfhack script for custom seed caps per species. Tbh, that should really be an opion in base UI.
Vanilla, they're way too eager to bag, but if you have zero bags they'll store a seed item per stockpile tile; could use water flushing-based movement to then transport seed into atomsmasher (or a kitchen linked to it that automatically posts cook meal job when there are any).

Though I think 200 seeds per species with dozens of species is bit much; at that point you're only going to be using a handful of farm plot tiles for each, assuming you don't have one massive farm for quarry bushes or pig tails.

For per-species cap, I think you only need largest farm plot size(*2)+however many caravan can bring+however many seeds you press/cook, assuming vermin won't eat the seeds (this might take raw modification).

If latter two are zeroes, doubling for plot size would be necessary if you want to immediatelly plant next harvest, before you process the plants for new seeds.