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| If it is heavily compacted clay, lime is the first step, bringing up the pH, will loosen clay a bit.
If you can get the beans off soon enough, follow it with groundhog radish (it is actually a type of daikon radish, if Groundhog is too expensive for your tastes. There are others) . It drills down into the soil with a long deep tap root and winter kills. It can be broadcast on.
Last, you are aiming for re-establishing the trifecta of bacteria/protozoa, mycorrhizae/trichoderma, and nematodes (beneficial not the ones that cause crop damage), and adding carbon to the soil. You will want to treat the whole field because the carbon in the soil, will start to hold water better, and thus decrease the standing water. Very simplified, worms can and will do the digging and incorporation, and loosen up the soil, so feed the worms and worm poop feeds the plants.
The CHEAPEST solution sounds crazy. Is you make a compost tea, which is short for your own bacteria. It is basically, healthy compost, throw in some healthy forest soil. both should smell good and thus have good bacteria. Then add food for microbs, put it in a filter bag and aerated it in a big tank. The bacteria multiply exponentially so it only takes a day for them to grow. The forest soil will have -some- spores and some beneficial nematodes, and neither of those will multiply in the tank. Then spray it on ( you can add it to water but I don't recall the rate like 10:1 maybe) but because it is alive do it late in the evening, or right before a rain, because the UV light from the sun plus the heat can kill it in a couple of hours. The key is oxygen because you want to favor aerobic bacteria because those are the ones that don't exist in the compacted soil. If you want more information, I would be happy to pass that on, but you may not so I am excluding for brevity.
Almost all the commercial solutions do almost the exact same thing. They fall into two categories, feed the microbes or supply microbes that are supposed to be there but aren't. If your soil is that compacted to begin with, it might take several applications over a few years to get it turned around because of the interdependencies because they need a good environment to live. . IE one creates food for the next, or one feeds on the other, then poops out stuff your plants can use.
really the ideal goal is to get carbon built up in the soil, you can do that with biochar, which is fancy for charcoal, which you can either buy, or make your own from your brush pile. It DOES have to be innoculated first or otherwise it doesn't work. It has a high CEC, it will suck up nutrients you want your plants to have. I added some to the pond in a laundry "delicates" bag from the dollar store, and the algae and duckweed were gone in a week, and the lily pads were turning purple from like what looked like phosphorous deficiency.
As much as we like to think we know it all, we don't, and it isn't an exact science. In most cases, something is better then nothing, thus you see 1000 different methods. Teraganix, is telling me their most effective strain is lactobacillus, (they won't give a list of the other 82 micro-organisms they are advertising), and you can buy that as a probiotic from the drug store, and throw it in your compost tea, and if you do that might as well throw in milk because the milk fat is broken down by the bacteria in a probiotic and it good bacteria food.
I could go on, but simplified if it is good for the worms, it is probably good for your crops and compacted soil.
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soil conditioners
