Charles Sherwood Noble - The Noble Blade

The Noble Blade

The land that Charles Noble farmed in southern Alberta sits in what is known as the dry-belt. 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 is 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. Today, variations of the Noble blade, produced by all the major farm equipment manufacturers, have supplanted the mold board plow as the main tillage implement in use.