My ag coop magazine had a recent article on how pre-mechanisation (some places here, into the 1950s) agriculture worked: the tl;dr is no private life under strict hierarchy for 12+ hour days, so it's no wonder they'd run off to the city to get factory jobs instead.

One pull quote was a 1920s era law: "Servants and agricultural workers must be given, every other Sunday, at least 4 hours off"