Lofted farms work great. Raise your field up about 5 clicks, then cultivate it, and nothing will bother it again unless you get into a pitched battle there (don't do that, jump down and engage).
Berry patches etc can also be lofted, they ride the terrain up with your efforts. I have a wonderful raised cloudberry farm.

most (all??) meat can be cooked directly for a crap food to tide you over. Lox and bug are 50 and 60 health with no other ingredient, and wolf/boar make jerky with only honey. A combo of 2 jerkys and anything is fine for low level areas. Bug/lox+1 is fine even for the mistlands if you are geared out. I like the idea, just saying that junk food is easy already. I would love some sort of throw it in the pot and discover the result cooking instead of preset only ... and even more fun they could do it like rogue (potions, scrolls, wands, etc you had to figure out what they did the hard way) where every game the recipes are different, so people can't post the combos online and cheat their way through it.

plantable bushes is probably one of the dev's 'you must do some things by going out and about rather than sit at home' paradigm. I don't expect it to change, but people have added mods for this. I won't mod, so I set up shop near large supplies and protect them.