It is an ambitious goal to produce a comprehensive book distilled from the vast scientific literature on wheat. The editor is to be congratulated on successfully accomplishing this goal, involving marshalling 64 contributors who have written 23 chapters. The book is divided into four sections, entitled ‘Making of a wheat plant’, ‘Making of a wheat crop’, ‘Making of a wheat cultivar’ and ‘Making of a wheat industry’. This is a neat way of organizing the text, although the ‘Making of a wheat plant’ section is perhaps the least coherent. This section has only three chapters, two of which (‘Wheat evolution, domestication and improvement' and ‘The flowering pathway in wheat’) could fit equally well into ‘The making of a wheat cultivar’ section. As a crop physiologist, on first reading the contents list, I was disappointed not to find a chapter on physiology. When studying the chapters, however, I found that there is physiology dispersed throughout the book, especially in the chapter on grain yield improvement in water-limited environments.

The book is an authoritative source of up-to-date information on almost all technical aspects of wheat. European readers may, however, be surprised by the relatively limited treatment of agrochemicals. Chemical crop protection is a huge component of wheat agronomy in the high-yield environments of Northern Europe, but cultural control and cultivar resistance are more important in the majority of world wheat production, and the book appropriately reflects this.

The book is not only up-to-date but also takes a forward look as to how wheat agronomy and cultivars will develop in the future. The focus of this book is the need to increase production efficiency in the face of relentless population growth and declining resource availability. One important omission from this forward look, in the opinion of this reviewer, is the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in future wheat production. For example, no-till production is covered in several chapters in ‘The making of a wheat crop’ section and the advantage of no-till in reducing weed problems, but disadvantage in increasing trash-borne diseases, is clear to the reader. But the potential of no-till for increasing soil carbon storage and taking GHGs out of the atmosphere does not seem to feature. Even the nitrogen chapter appears to omit the mention of GHGs, despite nitrous oxide emissions derived from nitrogen fertilizer being a major component of the total GHG emissions in wheat production. In the coming decades, every aspect of technology will surely have to be reappraised for the potential to reduce GHGs – wheat production will be no exception.

On balance, this is an excellent reference book which should be in every agricultural library and it will be one of the first places where I will look for a review of almost any aspect of wheat.