 Edward Linacre from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne is the winner of the 2011 James Dyson award for his airdrop - a low-cost, low-maintenance aid to the problems of farming in arid areas.  James Dyson said: "airdrop shows how simple, natural principles such as the condensation of water can be applied to good effect through skilled design and robust engineering." Linacre and his university department each received a ? 10,000 prize.  What was your inspiration for the airdrop?  It came out of a project I was doing at university. There was a huge drought gripping australia at the time, the worst in 100 years. I spent a lot of time talking to an orange farmer who explained to me the problems farmers were having because of the lack of water. What really drove it home to me were the increasing rates of suicide among farmers as a result of the years of mounting debt and failing crops.  I started by looking at what was happening to the soil. all the water was evaporating from the soil and the water vapour was continuing up into the atmosphere and contributing to greenhouse gases. I thought that there had to be a way of capturing that water vapour and feeding it back down into the roots of the plants where it belongs - to hydrate the soil once more and stop it from reaching up into the atmosphere.  You also found inspiration from how nature copes with arid conditions?  I discovered that nature efficiently captures water from the air in countless ways. There's the self-irrigating desert rhubarb, which can harvest 16 times more water than other plants in the region where it grows by deep, water-channelling cavities in its leaves. Then there's the Namib desert beetle, whose habitat is one of the driest places on earth (half an inch of rain per year). It lives off the dew it collects on the hydrophilic skin of its back in the early mornings. These stories inspired me to investigate low-tech atmospheric water harvesting solutions. We need to look to nature for inspiration because these plants and creatures have been living for so long, overcoming many of the problems that man is tackling at the moment.  How much water is there in desert air?  It depends where you are. For example, in the Negev desert in Israel, the average humidity is 54% which means that in each cubic metre of air there is 11.5ml of water. What you need to do is get the temperature of that air down to a level where the air reaches 100% humidity - exactly what happens when you take a glass of iced water out on a cold day: the condensation forms on the outside of the glass. That's what the airdrop does, but in reverse: it uses the temperature of the soil on the outside of its underground piping to create moisture on the inside of the pipes.  Can you explain a little more about  how the airdrop works?  It's a low-tech solar-powered system because I want farmers to be able to install  