humus

dark-colored. stable form of organic matter that remains after most of plant or animal residues have decomposed.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

humus (noun)

a brown or black complex variable material resulting from partial decomposition of plant or animal matter and forming the organic portion of soil

humus (Wikipedia)

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (May 2016) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

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This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Italian. (May 2017) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

View a machine-translated version of the Italian article.
Machine translation like Deepl or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary (using German): Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Exact name of German article]]; see its history for attribution.
You should also add the template {{Translated|it|Humus}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Humus has a characteristic black or dark brown color and is an accumulation of organic carbon. Besides the three major soil horizons of (A) surface/topsoil, (B) subsoil, and (C) substratum, some soils have an organic horizon (O) on the very surface. Hard bedrock (R) is not in a strict sense soil.

In soil science, humus (derived in 1790–1800 from the Latin humus for earth, ground) denominates the fraction of soil organic matter that is amorphous and without the "cellular cake structure characteristic of plants, micro-organisms or animals". Humus significantly affects the bulk density of soil and contributes to its retention of moisture and nutrients.

In agriculture, "humus" sometimes also is used to describe mature or natural compost extracted from a woodland or other spontaneous source for use as a soil conditioner. It is also used to describe a topsoil horizon that contains organic matter (humus type, humus form, humus profile).

Humus is the dark organic matter that forms in soil when dead plant and animal matter decays. Humus has many nutrients that improve the health of soil, nitrogen being the most important. The ratio of carbon to nitrogen (C:N) of humus is 10:1.

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