Recent dry years have brought to mind the infamous Dirty Thirties, but this historical disaster was more than the product of drought, said Shannon Stunden Bower, an environmental historian at the University of Calgary.
Over seven-plus decades, Alberta farmer Charles Sherwood Noble developed and promoted new farming practices and technical innovations. Of these, the Noble blade cultivator was used around the world as a low soil disturbance weed control tool. For his work, he was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1943.
Charles S. Noble cut a wide swath through the annals of western Canadian agriculture. A progressive thinker, he was also an ambitious farmer and businessman whose guiding principle was go big or go home.
Blood dripped from Liz Roberts’s hand. She needed help but her cell phone showed no service. She stepped away from the fence stretcher that had gashed her hand. Driving to get medical help, she stopped several times to phone for assistance without success. From her family’s farm south of Cereal, Roberts arrived 30 minutes later in Oyen, a town of 1,000 hardy souls perched just south of Highway 9 in southeast Alberta, relieved to have remained conscious long enough to find a doctor and stitches for her wound.
