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Beginnings of the Davis campus go back to the year when the secretary of the State Agricultural Society, Peter J. Shields, discovered that young men had to go to school in other states to learn to judge dairy products. At that time, said Shields, "there was a College of Agriculture at Berkeley in connection with the University of California, but it was purely academic. It was largely confined to the study of botany and chemistry; it had no farm and little prestige; it was apt to be thought of as a snap curriculum, attracting students who wanted to go to college but wanted to avoid its more difficult work." Shields, who later became a superior court judge in Sacramento, began work to set up a more practical establishment for training young men and women interested in agriculture. Raised on a dairy farm in the Sacramento area, he felt such a school should combine the scientific "whys" and the technical "hows" of agriculture. |
