directly integrate practical training in farming with courses on the larger historical, social, and political dimensions of farming and got himself fired in 1874. The faculty could not understand why students should earn credit towards degrees for hoeing or plowing, and the farmers could not understand how learning the social history of farming could make their children into better farmers. Eugene W. Hilgard, Carr's successor, recognized that Berkeley's soil and climate were terrible for farming (the campus directly faces the notoriously foggy Golden Gate) and switched from "practical" to what he called "rational" instruction in scientific principles of agriculture at Berkeley. He concentrated on things like soil science and fermentation that could be researched and taught in a university laboratory, supplemented by limited data gathering and experiments (but not hands-on teaching) at agricultural experimental stations in the field. Hilgard was disdainful of the idea of a university farm. He felt that for such a farm to teach effectively, it would necessarily have to be a model farm with examples of the best of everything, without any reference to local profitability, climate, or circumstances, and such a thing was clearly infeasible. Founding of the university farm Around the turn of the 20th century, Peter J. Shields, secretary of the California Agricultural Society, became aware that colleges of agriculture elsewhere had university farms which performed experiments and provided hands-on education in useful agricultural subjects, and that young people were leaving the state to study at such farms. Shields began to champion the cause of a university farm. He was later honored as the "founder" of UC Davis in 1962, when the Shields Oak Grove on campus was named after him, and again posthumously in 1972 when the campus library was named after him. However, local farmer and politician George Washington Pierce Jr. also fought hard in the California State Assembly for the creation of a university farm, and influenced the drafting of the site criteria in the University Farm Bill to ensure that Yolo County would become the selected site—but unlike Shields, did not live long enough to see the promotion of Davis to a general campus and is now largely forgotten. On March 18, 1905, the University Farm Bill was enacted, which called for the establishment of a farm for the University of California. A committee appointed by the Regents of the University of California took a year to select a