You can milk cows. And clouds too, apparently.

When a climatic shift threatened to desiccate China this summer, the communist leadership fired rockets at the sky, not in anger but to seed the clouds and make it rain.

Shooting up the heavens proved ineffective for initiating precipitation, but a water extraction method used in Portugal and on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria requires no pyrotechnics. In some coastal regions, thick walls of fog waft across the landscape each morning. Scientists from the University of Barcelona collect the water from the rolling mist with the help of plastic tarpaulins stretched over scaffolding several meters high.

The annual yield of the EU-funded project called Life Nieblas is said to reach several hundred thousand of liters, water used to irrigate reforestation plantations. All thanks to low level clouds and plastic.