Any way to avoid needing to force drop while harvesting a boar in the early game?

I'm a new player and earlier I was trying to get Gold on the early game dark age trial. It took me a couple of hours, but, one thing I noticed slowing me down was after I had 7 villagers on the first boar there would be times where my food was below 50 before my mill was completed so I could not add villagers to the queue.

My work around for this was to force drop right around 15/16 pop so I can queue up 3 more villagers but was wondering if there was a way to avoid having to do this every game I play. Any tips would be appreciated, thanks!