  I give an overview of recent developments in the study of the coupling of the
QCD axion to nucleons and other octet baryons. I demonstrate how axions can be
included into heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory, and present recent
numerical results for the several axion-baryon couplings in SU(2) and SU(3)
chiral perturbation theory for the Kim--Shifman--Vainstein--Zakharov (KSVZ) and
the Dine--Fischler--Srednicki--Zhitnitsky (DFSZ) axion model.
