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Irrigation, Hydraulic Mining, Water Works, Stock Ranches, Etc. Connections and Fittings to Suit Service Required. ABENDROTH & ROOT M'F'G CO., 28 CLIFF ST., NEW YORK.

VICTOR TURBINE WATER WHEEL.

UPRIGHT OR HORIZONTAL.

The attention of Irrigation Companies is called to this CELEBRATED WATER WHEEL as particularly adapted to their use, on account of its remarkably steady Motion, high Speed and great Efficiency and large Capac ity, for its diameter, being double the Power of most wheels of same diameter. It is used by a number of the leading Irrigation Companies with great satisfac tion. In the economical use of water it is without an equal, producing the highest per cent. of useful effect guaranteed.

THE SMITH-VAILE POWER AND STEAM ELECTRICAL DRIVEN

PUMPING MACHINERY.

BEND FOR CATALOGUE AND PARTICULARS.

THE STILWELL-BIERCE & SMITH-VAILE CO., DAYTON, 0.

Rife's Automatic Hydraulic Engine.

WATER SUPPLY FOR SMALL TOWNS; WATER-WORKS; RAIL-
ROAD TANKS IRRIGATION; COUNTRY RESIDENCES; ETC.
An entirely new application of the Hydraulic Ram principles. Large Air-
Cushion, positively air-ted at each stroke, insuring ample air cushion.
Constant Action! Never Stops! The Double Acting Engines pump
potable water by impure water without pollution or use of diaphram.
Efficiency very high. Will elevate water 25 feet for each foot of fall!
Capacity up to 150,000 gallons daily. Flattering Award at Columbian
Exposition.

Send your conditions of Spring, Stream or Flowing Well for guaranteed
A Rife Ram at work Irrigating, etc.
estimate. Catalogue free if you mention The Age.
TABLE OF SIZES AND PRICES.

Price, Price, Single-Acting Double-Acting

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Western Agents:

PELTON WATER WHEEL CO.

SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

RIFE ENGINE CO., 126 LIBERTY ST., NEW YORK.

THE IRRIGATION AGE.

VOL. IX.

CHICAGO, MAY, 1896.

No. 5.

THE

PUMP IRRIGATION ON THE PLAINS.

BY H. V. HINCKLEY.

(Consulting Irrigation Engineer, Topeka, Kansas.)

HE only limit to the profitable development of the billion acres embraced in the "Great American Desert" is the extent of the available water supply. The mountains and the plains afford hydrographic conditions which are entirely dissimilar. The "little farm well tilled" and watered, when compared with the bonanza wheat farming of recent years, is a step toward agricultural independence. The community in which the individual secures water from an unlimited supply under his own land is free from the control of bonded syndicates.

It is not within the province of this article to discover the various causes of financial embarrassment which have come upon many of the landed and bonded canal and water supply systems in, or originating in the mountains. The most practicable plan for the conservation of mountain waters for use in mountain parks, or on the plains in immediate proximity to the mountains, is that of mountain or cañon reservoirs with open channel or pipe conveyors, and failures of such systems to pay the anticipated revenues have not been due to the fact that they have been so constructed. Upon the prairie plains, however, natural reservoir sites or favorable dam sites are scarce, evaporation reaches high maxima and artificial reservoir storage of surface run-off is, in general, impracticable.

The plains streams are generally intermittent and are often dry during the season when water is most needed for plant growth. Where the plains break geologically into high rolling lands, as in Eastern Kansas and Nebraska, storage in a small way is practicable (that is to say, in reser

voirs smaller by far than those which are or would be built in the mountains) as by a dam, across a ravine, holding back a lake of say ten to 100 acres. Some of the valleys within these broken plains and a large area of the prairies have beneath them a never-failing water supply, moving constantly but slowly under the influence of gravity toward the sea or toward natural surface channels in which it may flow oceanward or be evaporated. This underflow is replenished by rainfall sinking through the sandy soils of the plains in general and, in the valleys, by the downward lateral flow, from natural channels, of storm waters or mountain snow waters.

It is generally conceded that to dam a plains river, like the Platte or the Arkansas, having a practically bottomless bed of sand, and to thereby hold back and divert the floods either into service canals or into side-hill or other reservoirs, is impracticable. Numerous canals have been built for the diversion from these rivers, during the flood season, of the portions of the flood represented by the carrying capacity of such canals. The general result is an annual washout of cheaply constructed head-works, an unseasonable, unreliable and, consequently, unsatisfactory service to patrons.

The writer will not say that the construction of canals upon the plains proper is in no case justifiable. Local conditions may be, and in places are, such that a canal may be an unqualified success, and such that no other service will fit them as well as that of a canal system, but the future water supply for plains irrigation will not come from the surface flow of rivers.

The entire contents of THE IRRIGATION AGE are copyrighted.

MONEY WASTED IN CANALS.

One of the Western Kansas canals represents over a million dollars of wasted capital, which was invested with a lack of knowledge regarding the hydrography of the region. Failing in attempts to maintain a dam for the diversion of the floods (into a canal having a capacity of only a small per cent of the flood flow) its company built a long, easy diversion dike. This failing, an attempt was made to tap the underflow by an open channel extending up stream, with lighter grade than Nature gave the river. Other companies are even now following suit, and failure awaits most of them.

The development of underground water supplies is properly a problem of engineering, not of financiering nor politics, and the man who attempts to develop the underflow by guess would go to law without a lawyer, and he must expect to be fined for contempt in Nature's court. Probably two thousand individuals in Western Kansas have erected pumping plants of various styles and capacities within a few years past. So far as known the rate of progress is illustrated by the following comparison of the number of plants erected: 1891, 18; 1892, 33; 1893, 55; 1894, 224; 1895, 1,241. The State Board of Irrigation reports that six of these men pronounce pump irrigation a failure. Is this strange? Irrigation is a new feature of agriculture on the plains. It has taken the writer over two years of investigation and study to get even a fair idea as to water duty on the plains, the cost and methods of underflow development, the relative cost of pumping by various powers and other kindred problems, all of which concern every irrigator, be his farm large or small. It is wonderful, then, if only a fraction of one per cent of the farmers who have attempted pump irrigation have made mistakes sufficient to cause them to pronounce it a failure.

COMMON ERRORS.

It is so easy for a man to put in a pump for raising two thousand gallons a minute from a well that can only supply five hundred gallons a minute, and whose capacity could have been told before erecting the pump; so easy for a man to assume that with an average annual rainfall of twenty inches he will need but a very little water, forgeting or not knowing that it is the minimum of two inches in the first six months of the

year, or the minimum of five inches per annum, upon which his needs should be based; so easy for him to find in manufacturer's catalogues the indicated and actual H. P., and so think he has made all necessary allowance for friction when he buys the necessary "A. H. P." computed from the water lift; so easy for him to base his windmill computations on a fifteen-mile wind given in catalogues, when the average is but eleven, to forget the law of squares and to forget that the wind blows lightest when he needs the most water.

A FEW INSTANCES.

Let us now look at a few fair representative cases of what is being done in one season in a section of country that has been nearly depopulated on account of insufficient rainfall to produce crops.

Eugene Tilleux, Tribune, Greeley Co., Kansas, uses an eight-foot mill; well 130 feet deep to water. Planted one acre of garden vegetables; three-quarters of the area was a total loss. Mill was only good for a quarter acre, and furnished not over six inches in depth of water during the season to that quarter. Besides all vegetables needed for family use, received from sale of surplus ninety dollars, which paid for the pumping outfit.

'I. L. Diesem, Garden City, Finney Co., Kansas. Fourteen-foot mill; seventeen feet to water. Cost of plant, including reservoir, $200. Irrigates twelve acres. Two acres sweet potatoes, 303 bushels; four-tenths acre onions, 400 bushels; half acre sugar-beets, 128 bushels, etc. "Have made a living this year and paid off a three hundred dollar mortgage."

J. M. Cramblett, Kinsley, Edwards Co., Kansas. Twenty-eight feet to water. Irrigates onehalf acre with small windmill. Yield: 160 bushels of tomatoes, sold for $40; four tons of cabbage, sold for $160. Cabbage yielded at the rate of $640 per acre. Onions and other vegetables for family use not measured.

V. Q. Billings, Kinsley, Edwards Co., Kansas. Twelve-foot mill; cost of plant $150. Put in too late; could not irrigate till June, when crop had begun to suffer. Had several mishaps with mill and reservoir, but still sold from one and a quarter acres, potatoes, $300; cabbage, $100, besides family supply.

N. O. Waymire, Garfield-on-the-Arkansas, Pawnee Co., Kansas. Reservoir is filled with an eight-foot steel mill located over 200 feet away. Cylinder is a 4x12 brass-lined Morris Perfection with 711⁄2 inch stroke. Sheet water is found at a depth of ten feet, and is drawn through a two-inch sand point. Pump is handmade, of two-inch pipe, with large air chamber and stuffing box. Conducting pipe is 111⁄2 inch laid on the ground, and goes over the embankment with 45' elbows, forming a siphon. This makes the lift thirteen to 18 feet, according to amount of water in reservoir. Ground irrigated in 1895, with reservoir shown, was one acre subsoiled, and 4 acre not subsoiled.

EGYPTIAN TYMPANUM.

Reservoir of 1896 is 50 feet on outside at base and five feet high. It is over two feet below the surface, will hold, when full, seven feet of water, and has nearly twice the capacity of one shown in engraving. Crops grown in 1895 were largely experimental but were satisfactory.

F. L. Richter, Garden City, Finney Co., Kansas. Seventy acres alfalfa and orchard, income seven thousand dollars.

A. L. Parson, same address. Five acres fruit and produce, six hundred dollars.

E. E. Frizell, Larned, Pawnee Co., Kansas. Reservoir 130 feet in diameter, banks eight feet high. Can draw out of it (at one time) over a half-million gallons, or seven acres three inches deep. Two fourteen-foot steel mills on thirtyfoot towers. Ten-inch cylinders. Twenty-sixfoot lift. Fill reservoir in three days on an average. Have successfully irrigated 25 acres of orchard, 20 of alfalfa, 13 of potatoes, 16 of beans, cabbage and onions. Spanish onions yield 400 to 1000 bushels per acre.

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The mistakes that have been made-the disappointments resulting from less acreages being irrigable by given plants than their owners had anticipated-have been more than balanced by the phenomenal yields under reliable water supply and thorough cultivation. The mills above mentioned are the common form of radial fan windmills on towers. Hundreds of similar cases could be cited. Suffice in a general way to say that windmills of ten to sixteen feet diameter (mostly steel mills) on towers 30 to 40 feet high are successfully irrigating from 6 to twenty acres with 20-foot lift, or 1 to 3 acres with 150 foot lift, and an investment of $150 to $300 is enabling the farmer to realize generally from $20 to $100 per acre per annum. No definite statement can be made as to average results obtainable from such investments. Intelligence and muscle are as essential as water. The man who still insists on growing wheat and corn does well

if he nets $12 to $15 an acre above expenses. He who grows alfalfa and feeds it nets $20 to $50 an acre. He who has a handy market for vegetables or has a bearing orchard or vineyard often nets $100 to $200 an acre and occasionally very much higher figures are given.

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THE MOGUL WINDMILL.

As the price paid for a pair of pants frequently depends upon the amount which the purchaser has to spend, regardless of the real economy of the purchase, so, many farmers on the plains who have trusted for years in the possibility of an increasing and more reliable rainfall, only to be disappointed, and who have lost crop after crop, and seed after seed, have been obliged to economize in the extreme in pumping plant investments and, in the absence of credit, to buy or make what they could. This has resulted in the experimental and limited use of the Mogul. This machine is generally set for a north or south wind, working equally well with either, and diminishing in power as wind veers toward east or west.

A Mogul 12 feet in diameter, 14 long, with 8 fans 2 x 14 feet, will irrigate from 1 to 2 acres with 20-feet lift. The cost, if built new and all work paid for, is from $100 to $200. If made by the farmer, of old stuff on hand, the cash outlay may be as low as $25. This machine is sometimes made with fans of one board only, say 1 x 10 feet, for irrigating small garden.

D. M. Frost, President State Board of Irrigation, has on his farm at Garden City a Mogul, diameter 18 feet, shaft 12 feet, fans 3 x 10 feet. Cost $175. Irrigates 3 acres in summer or six during the year. Also a steel tower mill, diameter 14 feet, cost $300. Irrigates 10 acres in summer or 20 during the year. Water lift 15 feet.

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*See illustration of Mr. Frizell's reservoir in April number of THE AGE.

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The Mogul is less reliable than the tower mill. The direction of the wind is not controlled by the irrigator and the wind is not as strong at the surface of the ground as it is 30 or 40 feet in the air.

From seventy to a hundred tower mills can be counted from the train as one passes Garden City. The windmill is the popular pumping machine; that is to say there are, on the plains, several times as many windmills on towers as there are of all other kinds of pumping powers combined because wind per se is cheap. Con

trary to popular opinion, however, cheap wind does not necessarily furnish the cheapest power.

OTHER FORMS OF POWER.

Following in order of power, after the Mogul and tower windmills come the gasoline engines, driving centrifugal or auger pumps for low lifts from creeks or open wells; rotary pumps (positive) for higher lifts, or reciprocal (cylinder) pumps for very high lifts, as at the Goodland state pumping station. These plants, complete,

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