The cereal crops rice (Oryza sativa), maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) and wheat (Triticum aestivum) provide half of the food eaten by humankind. However understanding their biology has been challenging due to their large size, long lifecycle and large genomes. The plant model Arabidopsis thaliana avoids these practical problems and has provided fundamental understanding of plant biology, however not all knowledge is directly transferrable to cereals. Recent developments in gene editing, speed breeding and genome assembly techniques mean that the challenges associated with working with the major cereal crops can be overcome. Resources such as mutant collections and genome sequences are now available for these crops, making them attractive experimental systems to make discoveries directly applicable to increasing crop production.