The pellets are put in an air blast orchard sprayer, such as is used by any typical grower to spray his orchard with pesticide or fertilizer. Inside the sprayer the pellets are mixed with water and agitated with a recirculating pump so that the talc goes into suspension. The resulting mixture is then sprayed onto the crops. Greg Hunter is optimistic about the prospects for the fruit crop spray. "You might say it's a growing market," he quips. "The technology is developed; the product is ready; it's now a matter of commercializing it fully. Our sales tonnages are still small but we see it as a very worthwhile niche market."

Meanwhile, back in France, Patrick Delord sheds some light upon the production of the mineral that is at the heart of this business. "Every talc deposit is unique and has its own mineralogical signature," he says. "For instance, within the Trimouns deposit there are at least 19 different, economically viable grades or qualities."

At Trimouns, the talc ore, hewn from the mountainside by shovel loaders after the overburden covering the deposit has first been removed, is roughly sorted into grades and is then crushed and carried by dumper truck to a cableway station. From there it begins its 5.5km cable journey to the processing plant in the valley below.

Once at the processing plant, most of the talc ore goes through a high tech optical separating process to sort it into the various different grades that are required to satisfy particular market sectors. In some applications, "brightness" is important so white talc enjoys a market premium. When it has been sorted, the talc is stored in hangars the size of two football pitches.

It is in that plant that the intermediate talc is processed and ground, at varying degrees of fineness, into the 65 different finished products that are supplied to Talc de Luzenac France's customers in some 350 different packaging formats. Similar processing and packaging operations take place at Yellowstone and at Luzenac's ten other mines around the world.