Chikens and rabbits and goats, oh my!

Yes Felicia, I am certain that chicken manure leeches minerals from
soil, or to be more precise, it kills microorganisms in the soil that
release the minerals for plants to use. I should have said that
directly in my previous post. My family raised chickens at one time,
we even thought about the chicken coop on wheels idea, so I became
familiar with a few aspects of them. Another note: like rabbits,
smaller chickens gain more weight per any given amount of feed. As for
seperating them off from the living areas, I used to live around
chickens. Chickens are loud and smelly, and will peck at anything they
can. The reason why chickens in commercial chicken farms have they
beaks cut off is because they will peck each other to death otherwise.
These things lead me to believe that it would be best to keep chickens
away from us humans. I think it's a bad idea to dispense with them
entirely because they really will eat just about anything, and if you
let the manure set long enough ( I think it was 6 months ), then it
really is useful.

Mating rabbits works like this: You take a rabbit of a certain sex,
and place it in a pen with a rabbit of a diferent sex. It's a very
specific sex, but I don't remember which. As I best remember, for this
to go anywhere at all, they need to have been in relatively close
proximity of a little while, so that they can become aquainted with
each other. Once you have them in the same cage, you have to stay
there and monitor them, lest the female damage the male. Yes, it does
happen, and must be watched for. After they've done their buisness,
you take the one that you moved back to it's cage. From my
perspective, it's work-intensive for things which produce such small
amounts of meat. Still, they do spawn large litters.

Now, I would suggest using the natural mating proccess of rabbits, but
that's little more than a glorified gang-rape and requires you to put
them out on a reasonable amount of land, which makes retrieving them
difficult. It also doesn't give you much breeding control. If you
hadn't already guessed, we were raising rabbits at the same time we
were raising chickens. I suggest you avoid lops, they're prone to
getting infections in their ears.

You can apparently get really tall tomato vines if you use rabbit
manure on them. It doesn't even have to sit and rot for a while.

I seem to remember that you need to comb the hair on an angora every
day. Are you sure they'd be a good choice?

The only reason I suggested sheep instead of goats is that sheep are
supposed to be a lot more docile than goats, and supposedly don't
climb up on stuff like a goat will. However, the Vikings (if I
remember right) used a specific type of goat to produce yarn, and this
goat had the advantage of a natural water-proof coating on it's fur.
This would be a useful feature for clothing, regarless of temperature
aboard station.

I think that one of the reasons for putting agriculture in non-habitat
regions of the ship is to keep down the noise of the farm equipment.
Also, it allows you to furnish the interior of the station according
to asthetics instead of neccesity. I personally would expect some
people to have gardens, anyways. As it is, I was figuring the rabbit
collecting on the 'bottom' of the model I proposed would probably be
by snare or some such. The krill and fish would be kept seperate from
the 'lakes' to make it convienient to gather them. There'd probably be
fresh-water krill and fish and crawdads in the window-lakes, but
they'd be there to maintain the water's clarity, instead of forming a
food source.