He also directed the Animal Nutrition Research Institute at Cambridge (from 1912), served as the first editor-in-chief of The Journal of Agricultural Science (1905–29) and was a fellow of Gonville and Caius College (1908–29).
His textbooks include The Story of a Loaf of Bread (1913), Food Economy in Wartime (1915; with Frederick Gowland Hopkins), The Chemistry of Crop Production (1920) and Animal Nutrition (1924).
[4][5] That year, finance became available for county councils to employ people from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford to give courses in agricultural science, and Wood joined this scheme.
[3][15] Some of Wood's early work in agricultural chemistry was on root crops used as animal fodder, particularly mangolds, including the chemical composition of different varieties and how this is affected by storage.
[3][5] Other early areas of agricultural research included animal breeding, especially the Mendelian inheritance of horns and facial colour in sheep.
[17] This work built on basic research on proteins and vitamins by Emil Fischer and Gowland Hopkins,[18] as well as earlier feeding studies carried out in Germany by Oskar Kellner.
[8] He wrote several textbooks including The Story of a Loaf of Bread (1913), Food Economy in Wartime (1915; with Frederick Gowland Hopkins), The Chemistry of Crop Production (1920) and Animal Nutrition (1924), and was editing William Fream's Elements of Agriculture when he died.
[4][12] A review in Nature considers that Food Economy in Wartime "should be widely read and acted upon", praising its "clear style" as accessible to the lay reader.
[19] Later reviews in the same journal describe The Chemistry of Crop Production as "admirable" and "lucidly written",[20] and its sequel Animal Nutrition as "excellent" in its description of practical applications.