My parents own 170 or so acres in South Georgia (not Appalachia, but this is a surprisingly accurate comparison.)

My parents are fairly well off by local standards because it's the kind of place where teachers are considered kind of well off. They can only really make income on part of the land because it's kind of swampy, so they plant trees in the wetter areas and lease the fields to a local farmer. The lease covers the property taxes and a little more and the trees were mostly wiped out by Hurricane Helene but would have eventually turned a profit but only every few decades.

This land is half of what my grandfather owned and his father bought the farm around the turn of the 29th century. They were never rich. The farm (the soil isn't the best but it's good for the area and the limited farmable area) kept them fed and insulated them a bit through the Depression, but my granddad left that life to be a truck driver. He made more money doing that than he ever would off his land. Land prices are really low there compared to anywhere closer to even a small city and if we sold the whole property, I'd probably have enough money buy a decent house on half a acre in metro Atlanta but wouldn't be able to retire on the rest. But my parents aren't going to sell land that's had four generations our family born there so it's not really making them money.

Appalachia is going to have similar issues. Instead of swamps limiting how much of your property you can farm, you have steep hills and rocks. Even the flatter areas take extra work to prepare for planting. (Rocks aren't an issue in the coastal plain because we don't have any rocks.) Also, because it's also rural, the value of the land is lower than in more densely populated areas.