Farming

I'm not liking the farming mechanic.  It seemed like a good idea on paper but in practice, it's just tedious and exploitive.  Here's how I'd like to see it work:

Some planets would have a Arable land tile including all starting planets.  Building on these tiles produces food.

The tech tree would have a path for players who want to get the most out of those resources to get a lot of food.  The arable land resource be destructable -- you can destroy it (like you can any resource btw) to put something else there.   This would make food take its rightful place as an important strategic resource rather than one that is simply produced by min/maxing.

What are your thoughts?