You can get more land by raiding a neighbor and seizing its land. It usually takes several consecutive tries before you can do it successfully, and you may have to destroy fortifications first, but it can be done. It's not foolproof, though. If the other clan gets fed up with your raids it can move during an off-season and you'll get no land. (If there's a way to get some of the land in this situation, I don't know what it is.)
Having your clan split is not a disaster. Just don't give the people who leave any land. The whole point is you don't have enough land. Give them cows or something. When this happens to me I let volunteers go. No sense keeping the malcontents. They leave plenty behind, in spite of what the ring says. You ought to be rich by this time anyway. They'll find a spot and the new clan will even be friendly towards you if you give reasonable parting gifts.
Yes, splitting the clan probably is a valve to prevent the clan from getting too big. It's a good idea. There certainly has to be something for this purpose. There is another interesting way the clan can be diminished, the Black Spear clan, an event which occurs in the long game. You don't lose many people to it, but it does help.
When the ring says you don't have enough farmers, decrease the amount of cropland. Don't recruit more farmers. The problem is that the farmers are complaining about being overworked, that's all. I like to have a report that we can handle roughly 10 to 20 more hides of cropland. That keeps a few extra people for when they get sick or killed or recruited for something else. Of course, once you have tons of stockpiled food you can allow a lot more. If instead you try to cultivate all the land you can, you'll get the "not enough farmers" complaint as soon as a few farmers get sick or something. (I believe each hide of cultivated land requires 2.5 farmers, so 10 to 20 extra hides means 25 to 50 extra people.)
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