It's hard to say; maybe there's a bit of cultural osmosis involved? Maybe it has to do with the combination of the vast amounts of unused space and the influx of jobs other than family farms (the one branch of my father's family that almost kept their own little extended clan together is so big on livestock, especially horses, that I honestly have no idea what jobs any of them have had. There was a family farm before I was born, but my father's oldest brother mismanaged it into oblivion).

My town has a significant manufacture sector, but it's mostly food products. It has some diversity by virtue of being a college town, though the college's primary majors are agriculture and business. So it's a bizarre sort of place that keeps growing, but refuses to stop being the biggest small town around in spite of a population literally 100 times the size of many nearby towns*. I think it's technically a city, but in practice it's an amalgamation of rural and suburban.

* I don't think this town has broken 100k yet. I haven't heard population numbers on nearby towns in a while, but I was not exaggerating my orders of magnitude, given the populations when last I heard them.