Janice E. Thies: Associate professor of soil biology in the School of Integrated Plant Science at Cornell University, USA, and international professor of soil ecology in the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Fellow of both the Soil Science Society of America and the American Society of Agronomy, and associate editor of the Soil Science Society of America Journal; past member of editorial board for Applied and Environmental Microbiology; subject editor for the journals Agronomy and Soil Biology and Biochemistry; expert consultant for FAO and US Environmental Protection Agency; guest professor at Zhejiang University in China; research focuses on soil management strategies for improving soil health and productivity in smallholder farming systems. Norman Uphoff: Professor emeritus of government and international agriculture, Cornell University, USA; director of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, 1990-2005, and of Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, 2010-2014; edited and contributed to the proceedings of a Bellagio conference on Agroecological Innovations: Increasing Agricultural Production with Participatory Development (2002); editor for the first edition of this book (2006); has been working on understanding the System of Rice Intensification since 1994 with increasing focus on soil microbiology in collaboration with colleagues in several countries, publishing articles in Plant Molecular Biology, Journal of Applied Microbiology, and Frontiers in Plant Science; in 2015 received the first international Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security.