My professor, Stefano Mancuso, was on one of the teams that studied plants in space with the European Space Agency to understand how they develop and perform under hypergravity. You can find the team and results of one of their more popular studies here. One thing he said to us just the other day is that if we think we will be able to cultivate plants on Mars at a significant enough level to support human life and/or transform the planet into something hospitable, we will be waiting millions of years. Sure, the conditions there resemble, as you wrote about, what it was like at the beginning of life on Earth, but how long did it take in order for the planet to become something that could sustain human life as we know it?
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Let's remember that the first wheat that human consumed that was fairly late on the evolution timeline had only a small percent of the energy levels of the current wheat. Through engineering and selective breeding and other such methods, early humans managed to bring it to what we have now. So if we can increase the energy levels through GMO's, we can reduce those millions of years to hundreds of years.
Plus we only need to start to feed 10 people, then 50, then 200 and so on. It will grow with the colony. Nobody is going there hoping to start the terraforming on the next day :P