The first number of the Empire Journal of Experimental Agriculture, of which this journal is the immediate successor, appeared in April 1933. It was part of a significant collaborative trend which included the Empire Marketing Board, the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, and the International Wheat Pool, and led in time to the Commonwealth Secretariat and, indirectly, to FAO. The new journal was intended to serve agricultural progress in all the countries of the world which were connected with Britain, including South Africa and the Sudan. In the subsequent half-century of great change many new general and specialist journals have arisen, particularly in the more developed countries, in the Commonwealth and elsewhere; and this journal has come to be concerned mainly with production-oriented agricultural research in tropical, sub-tropical and winter-rainfall environments.