Along The Way
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Noble Blade
Driving down a backroad near "Writing On Stone Park" located east of Milk River AB, I spotted this row of old farm machinery and snapped a pic.
Several days later while looking at the photo, I noticed a treo of Noble blades in the photo. I grew up in farm country and recall seeing these everywhere, although no longer being used they served a purpose in the 1930's when farming practices caused huge soil erosion with clouds of soil being blown off of fields.
A bit of history on the Noble Blade invented by Charles Sherwood Noble (1873 – July 5, 1957)
During the period of drought known as the dirty thirties, farmland within the dry-belt, cultivated with mold-board plow and/or double disc and summer fallowed every other year, was subject to massive soil erosion.
In 1935, while on a visit to California, Noble observed a sugar beet farmer using a straight blade tool to cut into the subsoil beneath the beets to loosen them for harvesting. He noticed that the blade was disturbing and killing weeds without burying them. Noble realized if he could apply a similar implement to the dry land back in Alberta thus leaving the crop stubble as "trash" on top to hold the soil and protect it from blowing the problem of soil erosion may be solved. He immediately fabricated a tillage implement patterned after the sugar beet harvesting tool. He called his invention the Noble blade. The next year he carried out all his summer fallow work using his invention. The results were so successful by 1937 he had fabricated 50 of the implements which he sold to friends and neighbors. By 1941 a factory was built within the village of Nobleford.
Sales of the Noble blade occurred throughout the dry land farming areas of the world. The Noble blade was touted as one of the most important agricultural inventions of the 20th century. In 1982 the company that Noble had founded was sold to Versatile Manufacturing Ltd.
The village of Nobleford AB is named after him.
The Harvest Brigade 2019.....
https://www.jerryclement.ca/The-Harvest-Brigade/n-R9DCCB/
