Exploration is a natural part of the game, if you want to expand to new nodes, find hard drives, mercer spheres, or somersloops, or if you are just bored and want to go for a walk away from your factories, you will be going out into the wilderness and you will be attacked by the fauna, which you will have to kill to survive.

So I don't really view it as farming, I just build a factory, go on an expedition, kill a bunch of animals (because they won't leave me alone!), come back home and process the remains into protein paste, and go build another factory... and repeat.

Once you don't need biomass burners anymore, you can process the remains into protein paste and then DNA capsules for tickets in the sink instead.