Biodiversity, Biofuels, AgroForestry and Conservation Agriculture is the fifth in the Sustainable Agriculture Review series from Springer. This is a useful wide-ranging book covering many areas of interest to the thinking agriculturalist of the 21st century operating on a global scale. It covers a number of issues in sustainable agriculture well, through a series of 12 individual chapters covering areas such as sustainable bioenergy use and the role of biotechnology, agro-ecology, carbon sequestration, conservation agriculture in the Mediterranean and semi-arid dryland agriculture, synergism between crops, efficient irrigation, sustainable practices in India, microbial soil quality, and silvopastoralism and biodiversity conservation.

With such a wide ranging disparate series of chapters a unifying overview introduction would have been a useful addition to the review to give a more unifying sense of perspective, position and place for the various areas covered. The opening chapter on agro-ecology is the longest and provides a wide ranging overview of this increasingly talked about relatively ‘new’ discipline and application and philosophy thereof. Those with any practical experience of farm machinery and farming might question the assertion that optimum field size of 1–2ha is the ceiling for operational machinery efficiency, but in general the chapter provides a useful overview despite its dense language at times. It includes a section on agro-ecology in the curriculum that educationalists will find of interest. The book is well referenced throughout as one has come to expect from the series and it is a useful addition to its partner volumes.