A summer vegetable garden is the closest many Americans will ever get to agriculture. In the spring, they prepare the soil before planting the seeds. In June and July, they water the shoots, weed the spaces around them, and worry about insects, slugs, and blights — and whether they should use chemicals to kill them. If they’re lucky, August brings an overflow of produce, so much, for some, that they now feel guilty about food gone to waste.

Growing food is hard and chancy work. It’s something of a miracle that we’re able to feed more than 8 billion people. When we do see famine or hunger, politics are more to blame than agriculture. In the coming decades, however, the odds of success will get longer. We’ll need to feed another two billion people under increasingly hostile climatic conditions.

This daunting new challenge has proved fertile ground for a new crop of books about climate change and agriculture, the focus of this month’s bookshelf.