We put this question to Professor Jonathan Jones:

Well, many would say, quite reasonably, that we shouldn’t increase the meat demand, but the fact is that we will.  It’s clear that China’s appetite for meat in their diet in particular is going up and up.  These are people who, from having rice seven days a week, now want have rice plus meat in one day out of seven and maybe even two days out of seven.  And so, as affluence goes up, demand for meat will go up, and I think it’s unfortunate because we could reduce our impact on the environment if we ate less meat, especially in the West.  But anyway, I think that’s what’s going to happen and a major trade pipeline is soy beans from Brazil to China to grow pigs.

And to Charlie Paton:

It must be in everybody’s interest to eat less meat and therefore, it must be in everybody’s interest to have greater biodiversity of fresh produce and that is one of the things we’re very interested in, in encouraging.

We put this question to Charlie Paton:

Well that’s essentially what we’re talking about [with Sea Water Greenhouse].  Yes.  Exactly, that’s the same thing.

We put this question to Professor Jonathan Jones:

Well usually, they don’t grow a lot faster.  They're just more disease resistant.  So you’ll have less losses.  So if your roots aren’t eaten by corn rootworm for example, they’re actually stronger because they can take in more water.  The roots are not removed from the equation, so the water harvesting from the soil. Both for the plant, is more efficient.

We put this question to Professor Jonathan Jones:

What distinguishes one fruit from another, involves more than one gene.  It’s pretty complicated.  If you want to convert white grapes to red grapes, then the gene that distinguishes them is defined.  You could put that gene and get a red grape back, but you couldn’t change species with one gene.

We put this question to Charlie Paton:

Well, we’ve built three and we’ve got three demonstrators working in different parts of the world and we are planning a fairly large scale commercial operation in Australia which will happen some time, I hope, later next year and we’re working quite intensively on the Sahara forest idea.  We don’t know where we’re going to start but we’re putting the numbers together.

We put this question to Charlie Paton:

Well, it’s a method of creating wealth in a sense because if you have no water, you can’t do anything.  If you have water, you can create jobs, you can create food, and you can create energy.

The answer to this was quite slow coming and no one really knew for sure, perhaps we still don’t know for certain, but there was certainly some work done on this in the 1960s and the paper got published in 1966 where scientists actually, they think got the answer. 

The theories where that this could either be something coming out of the soil, something reacting with water in the soil to produce the smell, or perhaps something organic, something living and it turns out, it’s probably the latter.  A group of scientists analyzed the air and they found that when you took soil, you find a very common soil bacterium called actinomycetes. This is a filamentous bacteria and it grows lots of little filaments that ramify through the soil, picking up nutrients.  But it also has another form which it uses to protect itself when the soil is very, very dry.  So, when there’s severe arid, dry conditions, it recedes into a spore and this is a dormant form of the bacterium from which it can reactivate when water comes back and the soil is fresh and there’s lots of good environment for it to exploit again. 

So what scientists think happens when you get a rain shower and it produces that beautiful earthly smell in the air, is that the rain comes down, it hits dry soil where all these bacteria have formed this little spores, the spores then get ejected up into the air, and they drift around in a cloud.  Because they’re so tiny, they stay drifting around in the cloud for quite sometime.  You then breathe them in and they smell the way they smell.  That’s their smell. But it’s also a form of, sort of,  dispersal for the bacterium because it then descends on another patch of ground, out of the air and can germinate and grow.  So, I suppose that’s one point.  Another thing to bare in mind is of course, there’s the other possibility that was also raised by scientists historically and that is that there are various chemical reactions that can occur when water hits soil or dry soil or a rock.  And so, it might be that some of these smells, because of particular rocks getting wetted, then chemical reactions are being elaborated and then they produce various chemicals that go up in to the air.  But we think it’s mainly the actinomycetes, that’s the main cause.