The draft method is an official variant:

"Draft: Before the game starts, each player receives a hand of 7 Occupation cards as usual, then chooses one and passes the rest to her left-hand neighbor. Each player chooses one of the 6 new cards and passes on the remaining 5. This continues until each player has 7 cards. Repeat this process with the Minor Improvement cards. This variant allows players to create better combinations of cards than with a purely random distribution. We recommend that each player should have played Agricola at least 4-5 times before trying this variant."

It certainly gets the job done, but it adds a lot of time to the game setup. I tend to prefer the "take 10, discard 3" variant for that reason.