Over a great part of the West, water power is very abundant and the
suggestion has been made that the electric energy which can be
developed by means of water power could be used in the cultural
operations of the dry-farm. With the development of the trolley car
which does not run on rails it would not seem impossible that in
favorable localities electricity could be made to serve the farmer
in the mechanical tillage of the dry-farm.
The substitution of steam and other energy for horse power is yet in
the future. Undoubtedly, it will come, but only as improvements are
made in the machines. There is here also a great field for being of
high service to the farmers who are attempting to reclaim the great
deserts of the world. As stated at the beginning of this chapter,
dry-farming would probably have been an impossibilityfifty or a
hundred years ago because of the absence of suitable machinery. The
future of dry-farming rests almost wholly, so far as its profits are
concerned, upon the development of new and more suitable machinery
for the tillage of the soil in accordance with the established
principles of dry-farming.
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