Spacing out your building chains

This will be an explanation on how walk times can affect your building layouts with regards to chains. For the benefit of the example, we will assume all buildings are level 1, and you have some supply of the components already in stock that we're trying to keep balanced. The basis stays true for higher level buildings so long as they are all the same level.

To demonstrate, we will be taking a look at the Bread chain. Bread production requires wheat (farms), water (wells) and flour (mills) in the ratio of 4 farms : 2 wells : 2 mills : 1 bakery.

Let's look at this in parts.
First, we'll start at the end of the chain, the bakery and 2 mills.
Mills have a production time of 6 minutes to produce 1 flour, and the bakery has a 3 minute production time to produce a single bread, and requires 1 flour as input. Pretending walk time was instant for a moment, this means that after 6 minutes the baker has done 2 trips from the storehouse to the bakery, and the mills have done a single trip.
Of course, walk time isn't instant, and we now need to account for the fact that the baker has done 2 trips. If the bakers round trip was 24 seconds (shortest possible trip), he now needs 6 minutes, 48 seconds to perform both laps and use up 2x flour. Our mills only need to do a single trip still, and if they were positioned immediately next to a storehouse for a 24 second trip they would need 6 minutes 24 seconds to complete and drop of their 2x flour.
The double trips required by the baker really mean that the mills can be located twice as far away from the baker, and still keep production equal. If your baker is 24 seconds away, the 2x mills feeding him can be 48 seconds away.

Secondly, the 4 farms to feed the 2 mills.
These guys have the same relationship that the bakery has to the mills. Mills have a 6 minute production timer, and the farms have a 12 minute timer. Your mills can similarly do 2 trips in the time it takes the 2 farms feeding it do 1 trip, so again, the farms can be twice the walk distance away.
Of course, if you've made your mills 48 seconds away based on your bakery from before, this would mean the farms could be as much as 96 seconds away, which is probably far far further away then you're likely to make them, but worth keeping in mind that you have that kind of leeway with them.

Finally, the 2 wells to feed the bakery.
Wells produce at the same rate as the bakery, but the bakery needs 2 water per bread, so you need 2 wells per level of bakery. Well's aren't worth upgrading, so if you have a level 5 bakery, you will need 10 level 1 wells. Alternatively, if you go watermills, you will need 2 level 5's per level 5 bakery.
I typically wouldn't worry too much about spacing for wells, or even keeping track of quantity all that much. Since they don't use licences, there's no downside to having extras.

Hopefully this makes sense. Let me know if something isn't clear or any other queries below.