My mother has lived in a couple of different up-in-the-mountains hamlets and I've met the people in nearby houses. Like you say, there's farming support work. There are also people like scriptwriters, professional wine tasters, hoteliers/B&Bers, architects, software engineers, government consultants ('what kind of consulting?' => 'consulting'...) and officials, retirees, successful artists, landlords living off rent from elsewhere, so on and so forth. There are heaps of people with 'portable' jobs that can bring money into a town, and plenty of those like the small town or hamlet life. You can't tell that a town doesn't have a well-off scriptwriter living in a back street simply by driving through it.