I’ve been able to significantly reduce the number of crops lost to rot by having at least one space between Farm fields.
When they adjoin, farmers get lazy and stop planting and harvesting for some reason, causing Rot messages and zero crop production.
Has anyone found a similar solution to Hunters glitching out and killing all the deer at once?
Is it a spacing issue, or what?
Just like with the Farm fields, I moved the Hunter shacks and put a space between them.
For now, that seems to have stopped the mass slaughter of deer glitch.
Has anyone else found this to be the case?
If you’ve run into the problem, did you have your Hunter shacks grouped tightly together when it happened?
No that you mention it, my hunter shacks are grouped together side by side with no gaps. Sometimes when I load my game it seems the hunters are not doing any hunting and the icon pops up to say no deer was hunted for some time. When I click on the hunter shack, the hunter then goes off to hunt. I need to do some more testing on this to verify.
I haven’t found your problem with my farms though but I will keep a better eye on my farms now.
I don’t know for sure, but there seems to be an issue in the whole game, with spacings.
I noticed that death cults seem to be centered around traffic jams on player-made ‘non-conforming’ single space bottlenecks.
A road between two buildings conforms.
A road between two walls is non-conforming and will create a bottleneck if the Wagon tries to use the road while foot traffic is there.
I used the T-tool to build a road up the side of a mountain slope to get to a gold mine, and made the avenue 2 spaces wide, so I could put a Fieldstone Wall up the slope next to the road.
Almost immediately the Wagon and 20 or so workers got jammed-up on the one-lane road between the Fieldstone Wall and the cliff face.
Most of them died of starvation there, even though the Wagon was full of food.
I now make my access ramps and any other non-conforming pathways or three more spaces wide.
I had a death cult begin when a builder blocked a T intersection in the road and I am glad he finished before anyone died. 
Hunters going crazy has happened to me rarely but it has happened
In a couple of maps, with the hunters NOT close at all, after some years they seem to go in a killing spree which doesn’t seem to be fixable
My solution has been discarding the current hunter, and hiring other
Maybe so much killing mess with their heads, and in the end, they’re more happy back in the trade of basic laborer