Andrew Gordon Beattie, CBE, BSc (Agric.), was born in 1898, and educated at Ontario Agricultural College and the University of Toronto. He served as a Flight Lieutenant in the First World War, and in 1923 was appointed Superintendent of Agriculture, Nigeria. In 1957, under the auspices of the Carnegie Trust, he carried out a two-month tour of agricultural institutes in India and Pakistan. In 1945, he was appointed Director of Agriculture, Nigeria, and retired from the Nigerian service in 1953, when he was made a CBE. The following year, he was appointed on a three-year contract to the Ministry of Agriculture, Gold Coast (Ghana), as Secretary to the Technical Advisory Committee on the Development of Agriculture and Natural Resources. At the request of the Ghana Ministry of Food and Agriculture, he undertook the task of assembling material for a book on agriculture and land use in Ghana. In his work on the book, he was assisted by a sub-committee consisting of the following members: J.D. Broatch, ISO (Imperial Service Order), Director of Agriculture; H. Brammer, Acting Director of Soil and Land-Use Surveys; J.K.A. Quashie, Chairman of the Agriculture Development Corporation; and K. Twum Berima, Head of the Department of Agriculture, Kumasi College of Technology. The book, published in London by the Oxford University Press in 1962, was edited by J. Brian Wills, formerly Compilation Officer, Scientific Services Division of the Soil and Land-Use Survey Branch. It is in two parts, with 26 chapters, and an introduction by Beattie and Wills.