Beef is a tough market. Around Argon prime, there's more farms than bakeries, so it sells at a low price. If you've ever had to vent a cargo hold of argnu into space because there's no room to sell it all, you'll know that first of all it's not a pretty sight, but also that argon space has more than enough beef.

I use satellites to keep notes, mostly on food. In The Wall it says "food 2/0" because there's two farms and no bakery, counting two M as one L. Adding up the 15 systems around argon prime, I get 11 farms and 7.5 bakeries.

Next to my Argon food hub, the satellite is called "food region 11/7.5 station 1/4". A complex with 1 farm and 4 bakeries balances out the area, and draws down beef stocks, keeping the beef you sell at a better price. It needs at least one farm so that you can sell beef as well as buy it, using the huge cargo space of the complex.

CAGs are okay, but I like to use 4 normal freighters, one to buy or sell for each of food and bio to make sure to push the economy. That way you can see what the market's like by what freighters are flying. If the factory's full and the seller never takes off, it means the price is set too high, or the market is flooded and it'll never sell.

You can also use the stock market to check the index and see what to build. If bio is below 50, build a farm. If bio is above 50 and food is below 50, build a bakery to use up the bio. If food is above 50, build tech factories to use up the food.

So there's a few pieces of information to look at the market: factory counts, stock market index, freighter flying time. If the index is between 40 and 60 on the stock market, adjusting prices and settings makes a difference to freighters, but if the market's out of balance it needs to be solved by adding factories.

That's mostly to manage complexes, and you do need a fairly high rep to make them. Running a few separate factories does have advantages, like setting prices independently. I'd recommend building one bakery next to the farm. You can use it to buy beef at the lowest price and sell food at high price, and use the farm to sell beef at average price. Until your rep is high enough to complex them together, you might have to haul beef now and then between them... from the bakery to the farm, if you manage to sell enough from the farm. A freighter is faster than a factory, if they have enough trading partners.