You can harvest sticks from pine trees.  I have found that since you need sticks for so many recipes (bread, fish, soup, pies, etc.), you should create many bots to harvest the sticks, perhaps 10 or more bots.  In order to harvest the sticks from the pine trees, built wooden mallets for each bot on the Basic Workbench.  I have trained my bots to use the mallets on a circle of pine trees.  Each bot hits its mallet on the first tree, then the second tree, then the next tree, etc. until it has walked in the circle back to the first tree and the sticks have fallen from all of the trees.  Another set of bots collects the sticks from the ground until their hands are full and drops them into the stick storage bin until their hands are empty.