[davehcker]

It was!!! Personally, I have no aversion towards GMO. But in the end, it's the customers. It's already so hard to convince that food grown in clean and sterilized nutrient medium is far better than the romantic soil everyone is clinging to; GMO would take way more convincing. However, there are tastes that are indeed only found in the 'old' seeds, so there is do see the aversion non-GMO from customer side.

In terms of optimization, here are some:

1. What is the optimal time for getting a lettuce plant until harvest without juicing it up with nitrates?

2. What parameters could double the functional components of my mint (think about essential oils) and basil plants just by proper timing in stress and nutrition. These are already questions that botany departments have worked on- I want to bring them out in commercial setting (and may be a bit better).

3. Does back-radiation i.e. reflected light from plant leaves help in measuring plant well-being?

4. What's the right grow medium

5. In general, I BELIEVE, that there is a sub-optimal application (as in wastage) of light (which is roughly 20-30% of indoor farm expense), sub-optimal production in terms of the harvest we get. An improvement in harvest timing by a day would still be a very big volume once you scale it to bigger grow area; more importantly, I believe plant experts are good (even though very rare and expensive), but a DeepFarmer might be able to do better (and this is my main bet), both in terms of scaling and expertise.