Well, happily, the foul passing doesn't seem to have had too much of a negative impact on my village after all. The farmers got to work straight away and everything's now manageable again - two of them were runners, so that helped - and nobody got particularly hungry as stocks replenished. Good thing was, the farmers managed it all by themselves, without having to change anybody else's immediate tasks (in my village, generally, the teens to twenties work as builders, by late twenties to mid-forties as farmers, then as scientists until they drop...seems to be the best pattern I've found yet, although of course there are variances to both a positive and negative extent!).