Hungry pawns prioritize harvesting edible plants over cutting trees.

[Zombull]

Subject says it all.

Pawns know what plants are marked for harvesting. If one is hungry and there is no food, can't they walk past a few trees to harvest that berry bush without my having to micromanage them?

[Canute]

That would require a "clever" jobmanagment, but isn't that YOUR part ? :-)

[RicRider]

To the angry Viking: As much as this game wants to sell itself as a 'storyteller' game, it's inevitable that there's going to be waves and waves of players coming in and expecting a realistic colony simulator like Dwarf Fortress or a realistic survival game like Unreal World. You won't get any friends by insulting them!

To the OP: I suggest you get one of the mods that allow you to micromanage the work tab. With a mod like Work Tab or Complex Jobs you can change the priority levels of 'harvesting' versus 'plant cutting'. So for instance instead of marking trees for plant cutting, you would drag a growing zone over them instead and forbid it from being planted. Then your colonists will go over there and cut down the trees that are fully grown, but they will do this AFTER they have cut down the berries or agave that you've manually marked. You can change priorities with the mods I suggested and automate all of the things that the 'dumb AI' can't take care of by itself.