"It is imagination which will produce another Mars landing next week," he said. "It will be able to tell us more about the soil and water on Mars than what my bore runners can tell me about the soil and water on 2.5 million hectare Brunette Downs.
If we can innovate and take ourselves to another world, imagine what we can do here using that technology."
Mr Farley, who heads up Australia's second-oldest company, sees plenty of opportunities for Australian agriculture with global food stocks in short supply.
He said "food shocks" would be a common occurrence with agrifood demand tipped by the UN to increase by 77 per cent from 2007 to 2050.
Importantly, global income would increase by 211 per cent in this time, delivering long-overdue rewards to food producers.
Since he took the helm of AACo in late 2009, the herd had expanded rapidly from about 360,000 head to record levels of about 600,000 on its 1.2mha.
This rapid expansion had been a deliberate strategy to take advantage of a shrinking global herd with the United States cattle herd dropping 22 per cent in the past 20 years.
Australia - already the world's second-largest exporter of beef - was in a good place to meet some of the likely threefold increase in demand.
"Indonesia's average consumption is just 2 kilograms a person/year compared with Australia's domestic consumption of 30kg/head and Germany at 48kg/head, but many Indonesians aspire to be Germans," he said.
"I asked one Indonesian why they wanted to be German and he said because 'they have BMW'. What he was saying by this was that redmeat plays a big role in the development of your intellect."
Australia had dropped its game in agricultural research and development and he wanted to see more collaboration between science and practical fields.
AACo had transformed itself by becoming a vertically intergrated company, establishing market links and embracing technology.
Its philosophy of "if you can't measure it you can't manage it " had seen RFID tags put in the ear of 180,000 animals, storing valuable management information such as age, genetic base and animal-husbandry treatments.
Cameras had also been attached to the bore-running trucks to enable station managers to observe herd behaviour and pasture density across the stations on a regular basis.
AACo has also succeeded in developing different genetic bases for different environments with the Barkly composite and the Gulf composite in the north and Australia's largest Wagyu herd on its southern properties.
Its Barkly composite comprising Charolais, Senepol, Red Angus and Red Wagyu was delivering good results.
"We have been able to get our calving rates up over 70 per cent and our rebreeding rates to 82pc, and the animals going to Indonesia reach their maximum weight in 73 days rather than 100 and have a meat yield of 5pc higher than Bos Indicus cattle," Mr Farley said.