Trailblazer
Charles Noble
By 1922 an enterprising and ambitious farmer by the name of Charles Noble was a wealthy man owning thirty thousand acres of Alberta farmland and worth around 2.5 million. After a couple of crop failures, the Spokane Trust Company foreclosed and the 49-year-old Noble was left with nothing.
With amazing determination he was able to rent the farm back and by 1930 he was once again one of Alberta’s biggest and most successful grain farmers.
After arriving in Alberta from North Dakota in 1902, he became a part time land agent for the CPR and was selling land at the range of 1000 acres a day to American farmers who were being crowded out of the Dakotas and other Midwest states.
It was the black blizzards of the Dirty Thirties though that led to his greatest contribution to North American agriculture.
On a visit to California in 1935 he watched a sugar beet farmer use a blade to cut the subsoil to loosen the beets. He knew that was a big part of the answer to the soil erosion problem plaguing the prairies. He came back to Nobleford and built a stereotype using an old grader blade and a borrowed forge. Within a year the Noble Cultivator Company was incorporated and the Noble family was in the implement manufacturing business.
While being interviewed in his Nobleford Office, he interrupted the conversation, took a bottle of carrot juice from a jar and poured himself a drink. He explained that he heard it was effective in the treatment of leukemia. The disease claimed him in 1957.
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