A good friend of mine is from a (still) poor farming family from rural Vietnam.

When they were growing up on their coffee farm in the late 90s/early 2000s they lived in what was basically a mud hut with dirt floors, and helped with the harvest directly.

That friend (and their siblings) all ended up attending college in Saigon and getting white collar jobs, and their family still runs the same farm.

The difference was agricultural technology and automation became much cheaper, so there was less of a need to have a lot of kids do manual labor, so they sent their kids thru K-12 and later college.

My dad's generation had a similar thing happen as well in North India after the Green Revolution.

His dad was working on harvesting, sowing, and other agricultural related work at all times when he was a kid, yet when the Green Revolution happened - and with it reforms in rural financing along with cheap agricultural technology - there was no reason for my dad to live that kind of lifestyle, so he was able to attend school instead of rotting out in a field.

Democratizing relevant agricultural technology AND enhancing rural financing has a night and day difference in alleviating rural poverty.