Possible. You haven't provided a replay so we're only working with hypothesis. What I described could have mislead you into thinking the units chopping wood were initially farmers. The maximum distance units travel to garrison seems a bit normal. You don't want units to travel half the map if they don't find any hides close enough. Maybe there is way to optimize the behavior however, with better sorting by distance for example. Also the input to ring the alarm is rather limiting...

I’ve noticed that when there are no buildings available for garrison, civilians just stay idle where they are. However, I haven’t verified whether this happens because there are no buildings close enough for them to detect, or because there are no available buildings at all.   What I’m fairly sure about is that units do not switch to gathering a different resource. In other words, if they were farming, they will try to resume farming rather than moving to gather wood.

But, if I understand correctly, that doesn't seem to be the issue @Atrik, the issue is having less people in farms at the end of the alarm because they go to the trees instead.

They can be though, since there is that flood map where the water rises, so maybe it’s possible to change the sky colors in the future?

Didn't recheck but my experience debugging UnitAI tells me that what probably happened was: Your units were actually chopping wood on a woodline further from garrisonable buildings You call alarm so they move all the way into the buildings The exacts trees they were chopping disappeared (chopped by other units : your soldiers) You ring end of alarm so they try to go back to chopping wood, but since the trees they initially were chopping are no longer there, they search new trees, but relative to their own position. Making your civilians start chopping trees at a different place as they were supposed to. Just a likely hypothesis and note for myself (or anyone) when I'll work UnitAI, since that would be fixable.