Thank you, and, I wish! When I was young, I really wanted to be able to move to a space colony for retirement.
And "space farms" were a serious interest, spun off from the L5 movement. They came up with an accelerated way to compost organic wastes, involving high pressure, steam and an iron catalyst. I think the rationale for "Why not just a compost heap?" was that they felt they had to move the nutrients as rapidly as possible from "waste" to "fertilizer".
Maybe if they re-designed it toady, they would focus on organic methods, and just optimize those for rapid turn-around.
(Each pound of biomass dedicated to supporting in-orbit agriculture would be hugely expensive if lifted from Earth. The idea of letting tons of waste "just rot slowly" would have tied up enough biomass to feed many people, if it could be rapidly turned back into plant food. But now it's widely thought that productive, organic soil produces better crops, perhaps faster, than hydroponics.)
