Abstract Temperature is one of the most important factors that determine plant growth, development, and yield. Accurate summarization of plant temperature response is thus a prerequisite to successful crop systems modelling and application of such models to management. This paper reports on a general equation that can be used to simulate the temperature response of plants. The equation reads as r=R max ( T max - T T max - T opt ) ( T T opt ) T opt T max - T opt , where r is the daily rate of growth (or development) at any temperature, T opt is the optimum temperature, T max is the maximum temperature, and R max is the maximum rate of growth or development at T opt . It has the smallest number of parameters possible to simulate the plant response to the full range of temperatures relevant to plant growth and development. The equation was shown to successfully simulate the growth and development of maize, bean, wheat, barley, sorghum, and lambsquarters. The adjusted R -square of fit ranged from 0.747 to 0.998, mostly greater than 0.9. For one maize dataset that contains independent data, the equation was shown to be highly predictive. The equation could find application in crop germplasm classification, crop modelling and environmental control of artificial crop production systems.