My problem is that I now have a population of 17 because I kept needing kids to find the mushrooms. How do you keep a population of 10 while researching if no-one can collect the mushrooms that are needed to have food?

I have Tech 2 of everything, and only 20,000 points toward my Nature level 2. I keep doing rain dances to get more mushrooms, but they don't go far. My trees grew more fruit twice, but haven't lately.