The sight of a dozen or so fat young horses and mares feeding and frolicking on the wild range of the Southwest would probably inspire the average farmer as an awful example of horsepower running to waste. If, by some miracle, he came on such a sight in his own pastures, he would probably consume much time practising the impossible art of "creasing" the wild creatures with a rifle bullet—after the style of Kit Carson and other free rovers of the old prairies when they were in need of a new mount. He would probably spend uncounted hours behind the barn learning to throw a lariat; and one fine day he would sally forth to capture a horsepower or two—and, once captured, he would use strength and strategy breaking the wild beast to harness. A single horsepower—animal—will do the work of lifting 23,000 pounds one foot in one minute, providing the animal is young, and sound, and is fed 12 quarts of oats and 10 or 15 pounds of hay a day, and is given a chance to rest 16 hours out of 24—providing also it has a dentist to take care of its teeth occasionally, and a blacksmith chiropodist to keep it in shoes. On the hoof, this horsepower is worth about $200—unless the farmer is looking for something fancy in the way of drafters, when he will have to go as high as $400 for a big fellow. And after 10 or 15 years, the farmer would look around for another horse, because an animal grows old.

This animal horsepower isn't a very efficient horsepower. In fact, it is less than three-fourths of an actual horsepower, as engineers use the term. A real horsepower will do the work of lifting 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute—or 550 pounds one foot in one second. Burn a pint of gasoline, with 14 pounds of air, in a gasoline engine, and the engine will supply one 33,000-pound horsepower for an hour. The gasoline will cost about 2 cents, and the air is supplied free. If it was the air that cost two cents a pound, instead of the gasoline, the automobile industry would undoubtedly stop where it began some fifteen years ago. It is human nature, however, to grumble over this two cents.

Yet the average farmer who would get excited if sound young chunks and drafters were running wild across his pastures, is not inspired by any similar desire of possession and mastery by the sight of a brook, or a rivulet that waters his meadows. This brook or river is flowing down hill to the sea. Every 4,000 gallons that falls one foot in one minute; every 400 gallons that falls 10 feet in one minute; or every 40 gallons that falls 100 feet in one minute, means the power of one horse going to waste—not the $200 flesh-and-blood kind that can lift only 23,000 pounds a foot a minute—but the 33,000 foot-pound kind. Thousands of farms have small streams in their very dooryard, capable of developing five, ten, twenty, fifty horsepower twenty-four hours a day, for the greater part of the year. Within a quarter of a mile of the great majority of farms (outside of the dry lands themselves) there are such streams. Only a small fraction of one per cent of them have been put to work, made to pay their passage from the hills to the sea.

The United States government geological survey engineers recently made an estimate of the waterfalls capable of developing 1,000 horsepower and over, that are running to waste, unused, in this country. They estimated that there is available, 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 water a minute, falling ten feet, will supply the average farm with all the conveniences of electricity. This is a very modest creek—the kind of brook or creek that is ignored by the man who would think time well spent in putting in a week capturing a wild horse, if a miracle should send such a beast within reach. And the task of harnessing and breaking this water-horsepower is much more simple and less dangerous than the task of breaking a colt to harness.