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Ibn Al Awwam
Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Al-'Awwam Al-Ishbili-Ibn al-ʿAwwām (also known as Ibn Awwam) was an agriculturist who wrote a book on agriculture. His birth date is unknown but historians say he was born in the 12th century and died in 1158. We do not know much about Ibn Awwam, he does not appear in any biographies but is noted by an early 15th century encyclopedist named Al-Qalqashandi. There is also some textual evidence in his work that shows that Ibn Awwam carried out many successful agricultural experiments in the west of Seville. Ibn Awwam was a very educated man and spent a lot of time outside studying plants. With the information he got, he combined his studies and previous studies of Greek, Persian, and Egyptian scholars into a new Book of Agriculture called the “Kitab Al-Filaha.” The book had 34 chapters on agriculture and taking care of animals. The book also gave farmers precise instructions. He wrote about 585 plants, and explained the cultivation of over 50 fruit trees. He also made observations on grafting, soil properties, preparation and manure of plants, plant’s diseases and their treatments, gardening, irrigation harmony between trees, and beekeeping. His book was super in-depth and covered everything you wanted to know about olives, from how they grow to the treatment of their dieseases, refining olive oil, the properties of olives, and their conditioning. He also wrote a lot about plowing techniques, their frequency, times for sowing and how to sow, watering after sowing, maintenance of plants and harvesting. He wrote tons of information, this way no farmer could go wrong! This was published in Spanish and French in the end of the 18th and middle of the 19th centuries. Ibn Awwam’s Kitāb al-filāḥa is the most complete agricultural written work in Arabic. He gathered all the knowledge about agriculture, and animal care into a huge collection of short pieces from all the previous agronomic traditions and works. He includes one thousand nine hundred direct and indirect citations. From Byzantine sources, near eastern sources, and some from early Andalusi agronomists. He wrote about, for example, his experiments in mixing the wild olive of the mountains with the olive of the plain, and his cultivation of saffron under irrigation in the mountains. He also said that using plots that faced the rising sun were better,  then he also talked about the preparation  of the soil by adding manure which is excrement from animals used as fertilizer. He also encouraged sowing to be done between February and March. He wrote about the specific amount of rice that needed to be sown on any surface, and how it should be done. He also wrote a lot about the watering process, saying that land should be submerged in water at a given height before the rice was planted, then once the soil had absorbed the water, the seeds were covered with earth, and the land submerged with water again. Ibn Awaam also said that the best way to cook and eat rice was with butter, oil, fat, and milk! Ibn Awwam like many farmers today stated that the best manure was from pigeons, by today's standards this is very environmentally friendly and organic. He also wrote about cotton. He offered information on the manners, time, and places cotton was grown. He explained that contrary to ancient works, wheat shouldn’t be grown in consecutive years on the same land but should be followed in rotation with other crops. Because of the spectacular work that Ibn Awwam did and compiled into his book, farmers and agriculturists had step to step instructions to care for animals, and plants and many more for centuries to come. Surely without the work of Ibn Awwam, we would not be where we are today agricultural wise. Ibn Awwam’s  legacy is huge in his field, he guided farmers for centuries to come and discovered many new ways for plowing, the watering process of rice, soil preparation, cultivation of saffron, and maintaining and harvesting plants. In conclusion Ibn Awwam was a very important and influential person from his time. He wrote the greatest medieval treatise on agriculture and continues to inspire many today.