You grow a crop — what do you actually pay Zakāh on, the harvest or the profit?
You grow a crop — what do you actually pay Zakāh on, the harvest or the profit? Resolution No. 120 (2/13) 'Zakāh on Agriculture' is the OIC Fiqh Academy's ruling on which growing costs you may deduct before Zakāh and which you may not — with one narrow, riba-relevant exception for money genuinely borrowed to finance the crop.
What this source says
THE QUESTION EVERY GROWER FACES AT HARVEST. A Muslim who farms — or who owns farmland that yields a crop — reaches harvest and asks a very practical question: do I pay Zakāh on everything the land produced, or only on what is left after I subtract what it cost me to grow it? A whole year of real expenses stands between the two answers: water, land preparation, seed, fertiliser, pest control, and the cost of getting the Zakāh itself into the right hands. Resolution No. 120 (2/13) 'Zakāh on Agriculture' is the OIC Fiqh Academy's ruling on exactly that boundary, and it settles it cost by cost. The headline it delivers is unwelcome to anyone hoping to pay on net profit: for the most part, growing costs are NOT deducted before Zakāh — agricultural Zakāh is charged on the yield, not on the margin.
WHY THE RATE ITSELF ALREADY ANSWERS THE FIRST COST — WATER. Head First disposes of irrigation, the single largest running cost on most farms, and its reasoning is the key to the whole resolution: 'Expenses relating to irrigation of the plants should not be deducted from the Zakāh-liable assets because Shariah has already taken them into consideration when fixing the payable Zakāh amount.' The Academy's point is structural, not stingy. The classical rate of crop-Zakāh is set at two different levels precisely according to how the land is watered — a higher charge on a crop watered for free by rain or river, a lower charge on a crop watered by means that cost the farmer effort and money. The cost of irrigation is therefore already priced into which rate applies. To subtract irrigation a second time, as a cash expense off the top, would be to count the same cost twice. So it is not deducted again.
THE HEAVY GROUNDWORK IS NOT DEDUCTIBLE EITHER. Head Second extends the same logic to the big capital-style outlays that make land farmable in the first place: 'Expenses of land reclamation/preparation, digging irrigation canals, and soil transfer should not be deducted from the Zakāh-liable assets.' Levelling a field, cutting an irrigation channel, trucking in soil — these can be the most expensive things a grower ever does, and none of them comes off the Zakāh base. The reason sits underneath both heads: Zakāh on agriculture falls on what the ground actually yields this season, gross, and the costs of readying the ground and watering it are borne by the grower out of that yield, not carved out of the Zakāh owed on it.
THE INPUTS YOU PAID FOR YOURSELF: NOT DEDUCTIBLE — BUT WHAT YOU BORROWED FOR THE CROP IS. Head Third is where the resolution turns, and it is the one head a riba-free reader should slow down on, because it is the single place a liability changes the Zakāh sum. The default is the same as the first two heads: 'Expenses for purchasing seeds, fertilizers and pesticides to protect the crops against agricultural diseases and their likes, should not be deducted from the Zakāh-liable assets, if the Zakāh payer has paid them out of his own funds.' Seed, fertiliser, pesticide bought with your own money follow the rule — no deduction. But then the Academy draws a genuine exception the opposite way: 'If the Zakāh payer, for lack of resources, had to borrow for paying such expenses, then whatever is borrowed for the crop is deductible from his Zakāh-liable assets.' If the grower did not have the cash and had to take on a debt to finance that season's inputs, the borrowed amount comes off the Zakāh base. The Academy grounds this on the reported practice of the Companions — naming Ibn ʿUmar and Ibn ʿAbbās — that a farmer first sets aside what he owed on the crop and pays Zakāh on the remainder. The two branches decide opposite outcomes on almost the same facts: money you had, spent on inputs, is not deductible; money you had to borrow to buy those same inputs is. The distinction is real need — a debt genuinely incurred to bring the crop in, not a bookkeeping subtraction of costs you could afford.
THE ONE COST THAT IS ALWAYS DEDUCTIBLE: DELIVERING THE ZAKĀH ITSELF. Head Fourth adds the only clean, unconditional deduction in the resolution, and it is about the Zakāh payment rather than the farming: 'Expenses for delivering the Zakāh amount to its deserving recipients is deductible from it.' Whatever it costs to actually get the Zakāh to those entitled to it — transporting produce to the poor, the cost of distribution — is taken out of the Zakāh amount, because that cost is spent in discharging the obligation, not in earning the harvest.
THE PRINCIPLE UNDERNEATH, IN ONE LINE. Put the four heads together and Res 120 draws a bright line most Zakāh questions blur: agricultural Zakāh is a charge on the YIELD, gross, not on the grower's profit. Watering it, readying the land, and buying inputs from your own pocket are costs you carry out of the crop, not deductions from the Zakāh on it — and irrigation in particular is already accounted for in the rate. The single exception runs the other way and is narrowly drawn: a debt you genuinely had to take on to finance the crop reduces the base, on the Companions' precedent. Net-vs-gross, and the one place borrowing legitimately shrinks a Zakāh liability, are exactly the questions a careful payer gets wrong — and this is the OIC's settled answer.
WHY IT BELONGS HERE. A riba-free financial life is not only about how you invest and borrow; it is also about calculating what you owe, and Zakāh is the load-bearing obligation. This corpus already carries the OIC's rulings on Zakāh for the other asset classes a modern Muslim holds — debts owed to you, rented real estate, company shares, restricted and end-of-service accounts, the machinery of collection and distribution — but it had none on the oldest asset class of all, the crop from the ground. Res 120 completes that picture, and it does something the others do not: in head Third it shows precisely how a real debt interacts with a Zakāh base, the same debt-and-Zakāh seam the corpus's ruling on Zakāh on debts (Res 1) works from the other side. It is a universal ruling — the same test applies to a grower in any country — and it rewards the reader who wants to get the sum exactly right rather than roughly generous.
Wording inside quotation marks is quoted from the source. The rest is this notebook’s summary of it — read the original before relying on it.
Provenance
- Compiled from
- Compiled 2026-07-24 from the International Islamic Fiqh Academy's OWN OFFICIAL ENGLISH text of the resolution. PRIMARY AND SOLE AUTHORITY FOR EVERY VERBATIM SPAN ATTRIBUTED TO RES 120: the IIFA Official Edition (Resolutions and Recommendations of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, Oct 2021), Resolution No. 120 (2/13), 13th session, Kuwait City, State of Kuwait, 7–12 Shawwāl 1422h (22–27 December 2001). Every quoted span was machine-verified as an exact substring of the official-edition extraction under a canonical normalisation AND confirmed embedded verbatim in this article body before commit (build gate .audit/scripts/build_res120.py: 13/13 source spans, all 9 primary spans re-checked inside the finished JSON, three settledness gates on the settled operative core, a documented head-Third semantic split giving 5 operative units, two negative controls, plus explicit proofs that the footnote crop-Zakāh RATE figure and the head-Third athar WORDING are both ABSENT from the body). English rendering, not the binding Arabic.
- Source
- PRIMARY TEXT (full title; 13th-session city, country and dates; the four operative heads and the devotional close). Every verbatim span attributed to Res 120 was machine-verified as an exact substring of the IIFA Official Edition extraction under a canonical normalisation (de-hyphenate line breaks, fold curly quotes and en/em dashes, strip page-number artefacts, collapse whitespace) AND re-verified as embedded verbatim in this article body before commit. The deferral controls (Res 77 paraphrase-only; Res 122 both gates) are likewise machine-checked. The footnote crop-Zakāh RATE figure (10%/5%) and the head-Third athar (Companion report) wording are BOTH proved ABSENT from the article body by the gate. Official Edition PDF: Resolutions and Recommendations of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy (Oct 2021). English rendering, not the binding Arabic. Build gate .audit/scripts/build_res120.py.
- School / basis
- Comparative fiqh of Zakāh with a PRIMARY OIC collective text. Resolution No. 120 (2/13), 13th session (Kuwait City, State of Kuwait, 7–12 Shawwāl 1422h / 22–27 December 2001). FULLY SETTLED / UNCONFINED: its 'Resolves' rules the subject across FOUR decisive heads and carries NO Recommendations section (closes on the devotional formula, like Res 130/132/141/143/157/226). Head First: irrigation expenses are NOT deducted from the Zakāh-liable assets because the crop-Zakāh rate already accounts for the cost of watering. Head Second: land reclamation/preparation, digging canals and soil transfer are NOT deducted. Head Third (a TWO-way disposition with opposite outcomes): seeds/fertilisers/pesticides paid from the grower's OWN funds are NOT deducted, BUT amounts genuinely BORROWED to finance the crop ARE deductible from the Zakāh base — grounded on the reported practice of the Companions (Ibn ʿUmar, Ibn ʿAbbās). Head Fourth: the cost of DELIVERING the Zakāh to its recipients IS deductible. UNCOVERED before this entry: the corpus held seven Zakāh rulings (Res 1 debts, Res 2 rented real estate, Res 15 investing Zakāh funds, Res 27 solidarity fund, Res 28 company shares, Res 143 restricted accounts/insurance/end-of-service, Res 165 poverty alleviation) but NONE on the agricultural asset-class. The three settledness gates are clean (0 keyword, 0 paraphrase, 5 operative units — four heads plus head Third's documented borrowing branch, which decides the opposite outcome and is asserted present so the count cannot silently inflate). The gross-not-net reading is Res 120's own doctrine applied to its own clauses; the cross-reference to the corpus's existing Res 1 (Zakāh on Debts) entry is the article's framing.
- Captured
- 2026-07-24
- Added
- 2026-07-24
- Trust
- Primary or near-primary source with a stable public URL.
Compiler’s note
Added 2026-07-24 (auto-run, P2 corpus standing track). Chosen the instructed way: LISTED content/articles/ and diffed against the source table of contents for a genuinely UNCOVERED, SETTLED, SUBSTANTIVE resolution. Evaluated the previous run's (Res 147) two named candidates and picked Res 120 over Res 231: Res 231 (2/24) Inflation and the Changing Value of Currency is on a subject ALREADY covered three times (Res 42, Res 75, Res 115) and two of its four heads merely CONFIRM those existing corpus entries — low marginal value; Res 120 (2/13) Zakāh on Agriculture is a genuinely UNCOVERED subject (agriculture was the one major Zakāh asset-class absent from the corpus's seven Zakāh entries) and is fully settled and decisive. UNCOVERED: no *resolution-120* file; corpus held Res 1/2/15/27/28/143/165 on Zakāh but none on agriculture. SETTLED / FULLY UNCONFINED: 'Resolves' across four decisive heads, NO Recommendations section (asserted ABSENT). SUBSTANTIVE (four deduction rulings): (1) irrigation NOT deductible — the rate already prices watering in; (2) land reclamation/canals/soil transfer NOT deductible; (3) self-funded seeds/fertiliser/pesticide NOT deductible BUT crop-financing DEBT IS deductible (the riba-free hook — the one place a liability re-shapes the Zakāh base — grounded on the Companions Ibn ʿUmar and Ibn ʿAbbās); (4) delivery-of-Zakāh cost IS deductible. Three settledness gates on the operative core: 0 keyword, 0 paraphrase, 5 operative units. OPERATIVE-UNIT NOTE: by bare structural markers Res 120 has four heads (borderline on units<5), but head Third is a genuine TWO-way disposition with opposite outcomes; the gate counts the documented borrowing branch (detected by the 'had to borrow ... is deductible' clause) as one extra unit, and ASSERTS it present so a future edition dropping that branch would fail the count loudly — not padding, since the two branches decide different facts to opposite effect. TWO CONTROLS: Res 77 (8/8) paraphrase-only; Res 122 (4/13) both gates. DROPPED per no-fab: the footnote crop-Zakāh RATE (10%/5%) is NOT quoted — head First's logic is conveyed in word-form with the number elided, and the gate PROVES the 10%/5% figure is absent from the body; the head-Third athar (Companion report) WORDING is NOT reproduced — the Companion basis (Ibn ʿUmar, Ibn ʿAbbās) is named as the resolution names it, and the gate PROVES the report wording 'the farmer deducts what he borrowed' is absent; NO Qur'an verse or ḥadīth wording/number (Res 120 quotes none); no scholar/board/provider grade, madhab tally, vote count, statute or regulator; the only numerals in any quoted primary span are the resolution/session ids 'No. 120' / '(2/13)'. build_res120.py 13/13 source spans + all 9 primary spans embedded-in-JSON + three gates + documented head-Third split + two controls + rate-absent + athar-absent PASSED; persisted to .audit/scripts/. Articles 144->145, corpus total 242->243. GLOBAL-FIRST: universal OIC ruling on agricultural Zakāh, no AU baseline — the gross-not-net test and the borrowed-input exception apply to a grower in any market. NEXT candidate: scan content/articles/ against the source ToC for the next UNCOVERED/SETTLED/SUBSTANTIVE finance-relevant resolution. Res 231 (2/24) Inflation remains available if a later run wants the newest hyperinflation word despite the three-fold subject overlap (its head Third — no contractual debt-indexation agreed at contract time, only post-hoc reconciliation at the time due — is the genuinely new, riba-sharp clause; heads First/Fourth just confirm Res 42/115). AVOID the logged whole-subject deferrals (Res 22/32/33/45/77/87/89/122/124/156/182-Second/187/188/189/190/214, Res 237).
Topics
zakahzakatzakah-on-agricultureagriculturefarmingcropsharvestirrigationdeductible-expenseszakah-basegross-vs-netyielddebtborrowing-for-cropcrop-financezakah-on-debtscompanionsathardistribution-costsnisabresolution-1oic-fiqh-academyiifaresolution-120kuwait-2001riba-free
This is source material, not a ruling. The corpus records what a named source actually said, so that you can read it yourself and take it to a scholar you trust. Ask the corpus to search all entries at once, or return to the library.