  We highlight some of the recent advances in the application of chiral
effective field theory (chiral EFT) with baryons to the $\pi N$ scattering
process. We recall some problems that cast doubt on the applicability of chiral
EFT to $\pi N$ and show how the relativistic formalism, once the
$\Delta(1232)$-resonance is included as an explicit degree of freedom, solves
these issues. Finally it is shown how this approach can be used to extract the
$\sigma$-terms from phenomenological information.
