That's awesome! The tea thing is a good idea. No one is buying it yet, but the plan is to have some micro rain gardens installed this spring using the tech to reduce the overall area required due to the increased drainage depth and moisture storage. It's essentially an erosion control measure until there is a carbon market and we increase automation. We will also be doing some testing with trees - remediating poor drainage with living trees that have been already been planted.

Some of the organic material breaks down really slowly, providing some nutrients to bacteria at a rate that allows the gas to escape, but yea essentially the trick is the ultra high surface area and high compressive strength so that it maintains a porous structure instead of compacting into an anaerobic environment.

Yes, beneficial fungi reach much deeper than roots due to the higher penetrative ability of hyphae and they can still extract stuff from whatever depth they reach.

Long term I want to be able to do what the guy in the video is doing but with out all that shoveling...

David has a guest video by a lady working above hardpan clay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goUfl4x8URc

Essentially all of the permaculture advice for breaking up clay appears to be failing on her hardpan, so she's started using broadforking, which is a sort of compromise between tilling and building soil from the top down. The speaker in this video is being a little more aggressive with the broadfork than most people suggest. The idea is to open the subsoil without blending the upper layers together, resulting in the organic matter-consuming bacterial bloom you get with tilling.

One variant of keylining accomplishes a similar trick on an even smaller scale: you put one long slice into the ground. Water and organic matter seep into that cut and fan out from there.

That left over bit is technically also pyrolyzed material because very hot fires create anaerobic conditions. Integrating it into the soil seems like a good idea.