Is it handled differently? It doesn't even show how much food/tick you're producing like the old client. Instead of showing your food production and a food total that needs to be reached for +20 workers, it shows that the number of workers increases by a base of 20 plus the number of farm structures you have built after so many ticks.

My population growth before the first tick looked like: Growth: +22 workers in 1 tick; Base growth: 20; Food facilities: 2

However, after that tick I received the standard: 20 new workers have joined your colony message.

After that, I had 3 units and it looked like: Growth: +19 workers in 24 ticks; Base growth: 20; Food Facilities: 2; Upkeep: -3
Now, I have a level 3 farm and it looks like: Growth +20 workers in 20 ticks; Base growth: 20; Food Facilities 3; Upkeep -3

In other words, the display shows that instead of producing food, your farm structures only make you produce 1 more worker per so many ticks. This makes no sense... Once you reached a level 5 farm you could only have 25 units and your population would never grow.

So, is there a new system in place for food/worker production, or is the display for it just wrong? And if there is a new system, what am I missing? Because what I just described will never work.

Once I can log into the beta i'll help you out man!

There is a new system. I think it's based on per tick, how many workers you CAN gain.

So lets say if you could gain 20 workers by producing 1000 more food.

If you produce 100 food in 1 tick then you would get 1 worker. I think its based on something like that although im not quite sure.

To make it simple for the above example, it would be like 20 workers per 1000 food.

I don't know. I have the base of 20, and the 3 food facilities with 4 upkeep from units now, with +19 workers every 24 ticks. Last time I my population went up I only got 19 workers. There may be no upkeep on units now, but the way it looks it doesn't matter because your population would stop growing once you had more than 25 units... So once you've used up all your workers building troops, you wouldn't get anymore workers to build more troops and with no workers you get no resources too.... at least until you moved all your units to a barracks anyways.

I'm not saying I'm right... just that's how the math looks from my end.

Ahem let me explain. Units DO cost upkeep but you have to have a lot more then 25 to gain one upkeep.
Every 100 workers you get ads one upkeep. I am not sure where the 1 upkeep that you get that does not come from workers comes from.