‘Drought’ has many meanings in relation to crop production. These range from: statistical (say, the lowest decile of annual rainfall) to a meteorologist; through yield being limited by too little water to an agronomist; to sudden severe water deficits to many molecular biologists. To a farmer, the corresponding management issues, respectively, are risk management (how best to manage a meteorologically drought-prone farm over several years), how best to match cultivar and agronomic operations to the developing growing season, and how best to minimize possible major damage to (say) floral fertility induced by severe water deficits during flowering. All these definitions and the issues they imply are relevant to improving crop production when water is limiting. How can scientists best help? The answers depend on the scales (temporal and spatial) being addressed. Agronomists and breeders, interacting, can help improve components of seasonal water balance in the field, for example, minimizing evaporative losses from the soil surface by better matching the development of a crop to its environment. Physiologists, biochemists, and molecular biologists can help by identifying ways of improving the competence of particular organs. A promising target is floral infertility resulting from water deficits, which results from lesions in tissue, and cellular and molecular processes. Choosing problems whose solutions will have implications in the field and be attractive to farmers requires knowledge of what is important in the field.

Experiments with plants in pots can be beset by several often-unrecognised artefacts. The soil or other medium at the bottom of a freshly watered and drained pot is inevitably saturated with water; if the pot is short the whole of the medium may have such little air-filled porosity that it becomes hypoxic. This is an especial problem with field soils used in pots, for these typically do not contain many pores large enough to be drained at the small water suctions that prevail. Such suctions are zero at the bottom of a freshly drained pot and rise by 1 kPa for every 100-mm increment in height, leading to suctions at the top of a typical pot that are much less than the 10–30 kPa that occurs in soils in the field that have drained to ‘field capacity’. Commercial potting mixes overcome this problem by using coarse materials in the mix, which create many large pores (>1 mm diameter) that drain at small suctions. Fine potting mixes used for growing Arabidopsis in small pots are likely to lead to hypoxia throughout the pot. Pots in glasshouses may experience temperatures that are substantially higher or lower than the air temperature. Sun striking the sides of dark pots can raise the temperature by several degrees. In heated glasshouses cold tap water added to warm pots can greatly affect the growth of plants in those pots. Simple precautions can at least partly ameliorate these difficulties.