Scratch the automation question, I eventually figured it out.
Balancing is absolutely brutal early game. The time it takes to grow things is crazy long. Went into a sandbox, set up three of the incubaters with water, turned speed up to 128x and lettuce (I'm sure it only reached closer to 32x or something) and after about 15 minutes I had only about 10 surplus lettuce after about 10 - 15 minutes of that. I get that it gets better once you get fertilizer, but that's so far down the tech tree that without foraging and subsisting on non-automated food sources, you won't get far in regards to your nutrition. Also, the composter has two fuel slots and the recipe and fuel slot shares the same ingredients, so it just stacks up the fiber and straw in the fuel slot and nothing goes in the recipe slot unless you babysit it. Recipes for compost probably need a nerf (buff to output, less input needed.)
Default eating settings are also brutal. With having to do so much manually, you should make auto eating come early, scale back default settings, or make automation much easier. Toss out burner pickers. Having to reroute coal to your farms just for those is goofy when you'll be well into steam power and electricity by then.
