, every second of the day and night,
some 30,000,000 horsepower, in dry weather--and twice this during the
eight wet months of the year. The waterfall capable of giving up 1,000
horsepower in energy is not the subject of these chapters. It is the
small streams--the brooks, the creeks, the rivulets--which feed the
1,000 horsepower torrents, make them possible, that are of interest to
the farmer. These small streams thread every township, every county,
seeking the easiest way to the main valleys where they come together
in great rivers.

What profitable crop on your farm removes the least plant food? A
bee-farmer enters his honey for the prize in this contest. Another
farmer maintains that his ice-crop is the winner. But electricity
generated from falling water of a brook meandering across one's acres,
comes nearer to the correct answer of how to make something out of
nothing. It merely utilizes the wasted energy of water rolling down
hill--the weight of water, the pulling power of gravity. Water is
still water, after it has run through a turbine wheel to turn an
electric generator. It is still wet; it is there for watering the
stock; and a few rods further down stream, where it drops five or ten
feet again, it can be made to do the same work over again--and over
and over again as long as it continues to fall, on its journey to the
sea. The city of Los Angeles has a municipal water plant, generating
200,000 horsepower of electricity, in which the water is used three
times in its fall of 6,000 feet; and in the end, where it runs out of
the race in the valley, it is sold for irrigation.

One water-horsepower will furnish light for the average farm; five
water-horsepower will furnish light and power, and do the ironing and
baking. The cost of installing a plant of five water-horsepower should
not exceed the cost of one sound young horse, the $200 kind--under
conditions which are to be found on thousands of farms and farm
communities in the East, the Central West, and the Pacific States.
This electrical horsepower will work 24 hours a day, winter and
summer, and the farmer would not have to grow oats and hay for it on
land that might better be used in growing food for human beings. It
would not become "aged" at the end of ten or fifteen years, and the
expense of maintenance would be practically nothing after the first
cost of installation. It would require only water as food--waste
water. Two hundred and fifty cubic feet of