^^ If you pay attention, it does not work that way. It time lapses the cell you are currently in to catch up as needed. You can see this when you portal into a large farm and poof, after a few seconds all the produce turns mature, or if you come back to a kiln/smelter you sometimes hear it make the production noise a bunch of times quickly (does this if you sleep too). Its not too inefficient, but they should maybe take a pass at masking the behavior a little better, at least mute the sounds or stagger the crop maturation over like 30 sec.