Creative farmers

Four Canadian innovations made dryland agriculture feasible on the Canadian prairies and the northern plains of America. In 1886, Angus MacKay of Indian Head, Saskatchewan, invented summer fallow to contend with drought. Charles Saunders of Ottawa developed early ripening Marquis wheat to avoid frost a few years later, in 1904. In 1918, the Koole brothers of Monarch, Alberta, introduced strip farming to combat soil drifting. And in 1938, George Williamson of neighboring Granum, Alberta, invented the V-blade, also to counter soil drifting. Both the Kooles and Williamson were Dutch-Canadian.

Years of drought, winds and poor farming methods created the problem of soil drifting across the Canadian prairies and American Great Plains in the early 1900s. In southern Alberta, it was especially intense due to prevailing Chinook winds blowing across the prairies from the Crowsnest Pass of the Rockies. One of the worst areas was the Chinook belt around Lethbridge.

In 1917, drifting became so severe that entire fields were denuded, fences were covered and roads were blocked with dunes of soil. Serious drifting threatened to make a desert out of the Monarch district northwest of Lethbridge in the dry years of 1918 to 1922. From 1931 to 1937, a severe drought afflicted the prairies. By 1934, soil erosion had driven a third of the farmers out of southern Alberta.

Since much of the Canadian prairies and western Great Plains is semi-arid (10-20 inches rainfall), the land did not have enough moisture to sustain good crops every year, so MacKay’s discovery of summer-fallowing was critical – leaving cropland fallow every other year so it has time to build up moisture and nutrients. Fallow land, however, had to be cultivated a few times to kill moisture-robbing weeds. The usual methods of cultivating summer fallow were by plow or disc, which killed weeds but turned over the soil, leaving it bare and black on top. These methods of summer-fallowing made the land especially susceptible to soil drifting.

Deliberate windbreaks

The Koole brothers of Monarch are widely credited with introducing the solution of strip farming – a method of alternating planted crops and fallow land in narrow strips. Lorenzo Tuff of nearby Coalhurst first came up with the idea in 1915, but there is no evidence that he put it into practice. Leendert and Arie Koole independently discovered strip farming and tried it in 1918.

The Koole brothers had emigrated with their parents from the Netherlands in 1890 to northwest Iowa. In 1904 they moved to Alberta and took up homesteads at Monarch, where they were part of the flourishing Dutch settlement established in the Granum-Monarch-Nobleford district.

During the severe drifting of 1917, the Koole brothers watched as the wind snatched topsoil from their fallow fields. Talking with Dutch neighbors, someone observed that a fallow field did not drift for some distance east of a crop field, because it formed a partial windbreak. “Why not narrow the fallow field?” they wondered. Why not alternate strips of crop and fallow, at right angles to the wind, to protect the fallow strips?

Leendert and Arie tried it in 1918 on 240 acres. And it worked! So began strip farming. They divided their farms at Monarch into narrow strips, running north and south, somewhat perpendicular to the prevailing Chinook winds. Soon they found that strips 10-20 rods (50-100 metres) wide were most successful in preventing drifting.

The method catches on

After the ‘Big Blow’ of 1920, the practice became more widely adopted. By 1924, the Monarch-Nobleford district was almost completely strip farmed. It spread further during the dry 1930s. In 1933, during one severe wind at Monarch, damage was practically nil. By 1939, about 80 percent of the Chinook belt from Pincher Creek to Medicine Hat was strip farmed. The practice was strongly advocated by the Lethbridge Herald, the Dominion Experimental Station at Lethbridge and the Canadian Department of Agriculture. In 1935, a year of devastating drought and winds, the Alberta government required farmers to control soil drifting and prescribed strip farming as one effective means. The owner of a drifting field was held responsible for damage to adjacent land.

Farmers in other localities from Saskatchewan to Montana heard of the success at Monarch and came to investigate. It wasn’t long before strip farming was widely practiced throughout the Canadian Prairies and the northern Great Plains of America. The Koole brothers’ method “saved a region apparently doomed for destruction,” according to the University of Alberta’s College of Agriculture. Yet it didn’t solve everything. Narrow strips are inefficient to farm. Some soil drifting still occurred. And the practice led to an increase of sawflies, which concentrate around the edges of wheatfields and flourished in the added borders. Providentially, another Dutch-Canadian invention was on the horizon.

The V-blade

To kill the weeds on fallow land, farmers needed a better implement than the plow or disc. Charles Noble, a large-scale farmer at Nobleford, Alberta, deserves credit for his invention of the Noble straight blade in the winter of 1935-36 to combat soil drifting. This implement pulled a nine-foot tilted blade about five inches beneath the soil to cut the roots of weeds while leaving the weeds and stubble on the surface. The limitation of this implement was that it was heavy to pull, and the straight blade could be damaged if it hit large rocks.

Then, in 1938, George Williamson of nearby Granum invented a variation of this implement – the single V-blade. It had two blades in a large V-shape, which cut the roots of weeds and left a trash cover, like Noble’s straight blade, but it sliced through the ground at an angle. The V-blade pulled easier than the straight blade and was less liable to be damaged by striking rocks.

George Williamson (Dutch: Willemsen) was part of the same Dutch community where the Koole brothers farmed. George’s grandparents immigrated to Paterson, New Jersey, in 1892, and later moved to Manhattan, Montana, before crossing into Alberta in 1905 to claim a free homestead at Granum. Born in 1916, George grew up on his father’s farm nine miles east of Granum. It was there in his father’s blacksmith shop that 22-year-old George invented the V-blade in the fall of 1938.

His original V-blade was bolted to a wooden frame, but when he tried it, this wooden implement fell apart. George improved the machine by mounting the V-blade on a metal frame. That fall he successfully worked the stubble on his father’s farm.

The machine consisted of two tilted blades, shaped in a single large V about 10 feet wide. George used three plow beams as standards to connect the blade to the frame. The standards were curved so weeds and stubble would slide upwards and off the beam rather than clog up the machine. In 1939, he added eight rods with curved ends behind the blade to lift weeds to the surface. The machine had two car wheels that could be adjusted for height by a central crank. The implement was a success, and soon George made a few similar V-blades for neighbours.

Young George, however, lacked the capital to manufacture his V-blade on any significant scale. He asked Peter Kooy, another blacksmithing farmer in the Dutch community, to help him, and in 1939 George joined Kooy in manufacturing the blade on his farm east of Monarch. Together they made some improvements to George’s original design – a heavier frame, steel wheels, and they replaced the center crank with two levers, one at each wheel.

Patents & manufacturing

In 1940, Williamson and Kooy filed for a Canadian patent on their improved design of the V-blade; this patent was issued in 1944. The focus of the patent was on the single V-blade design and the curved standards. Charles Noble originally filed for a patent on his straight blade in 1937; it was not issued until 1948.

Williamson worked with Kooy for about five years producing small numbers of the blade. Since most parts were made by hand with a forge and a cutting/welding torch, it took time to make a single blade. The blades were sold by word of mouth in the local market.

In 1944, George built a blacksmith shop on his farm at Granum where he produced some blades. Peter Kooy continued to make the V-blades on his farm, with the help of his son Ralph.

Beginning in 1948, a few Williamson blades were also manufactured by the Matthews Manufacturing company of Red Deer, north of Calgary. That year, George moved to Red Deer and worked in partnership with Matthews to produce a few Williamson blades until 1951, when the Noble corporation forced them out of business over the issue of patent infringement. On the one hand, Noble claimed that its 1948 patent for the straight blade covered the blade assembly, regardless of whether the blade was V-shaped or straight. On the other hand, Williamson’s 1944 patent covered the concept of a V-shaped blade. When Noble took legal action with a patent attorney from Winnipeg, Williamson and Matthews succumbed to the pressure, and decided not to legally defend their case. Before July 1951 they ceased operations.

Williamson did, however, hold a valid legal patent focusing on the V-blade concept, and it was Charles Noble who actually took over from Williamson the idea of the single V-blade. He modified it to develop models of the Noble V-blade that became extremely popular – first adopting in 1948 the single V-blade concept in his model M, and later in the model K. Noble had the resources to manufacture the blade in large numbers in his manufacturing plant in Nobleford.

The Noble V-blade soon became a standard farm implement for summer-fallowing throughout the Canadian Prairies and American Great Plains, and it was also exported abroad. Though it was Noble who captured the market for the V-blade, it needs to be recognized that his version was a modified form of the single V-blade originally invented by George Williamson.

Together, strip farming and the V-blade were effective means of preventing soil drifting for a half-century, until the advent of no-till farming, chemical weed killers and fertilizers supplanted both of these means, as summer-fallowing was phased out in the 1990s. At any rate, the credit for the two innovations that had such a profound impact on preventing soil drifting goes to the creative ingenuity of Dutch-Canadian farmers in southern Alberta.