My grandparents used to tell me how they worked the land when they were teens, before mechanisation came in. It sounded pretty rough. I always wondered if the primitive technology they used was any different from the one used in ancient times. I always was left with the impression that agricultural tech did not change that much through the millenia.
Edit: I am actually not sure if the plows they used were made of wood or metal. In any event, it seems that ancient civilizations were perfectly capable to use both materials.
Edit: I also know that they had a very robust understanding of crop rotation but I am not entirely sure how it worked (e.g. what crops were rotated and when).
A lot of that depends on how you define different. The core elements of agriculture have been the same for millennia - you have to do basically the same thing, which is dig a hole in the ground and put a seed in it, then tend to that seed. I'm going to talk about some examples of how technology changed, and how that might (or might not) have led to "different" quality of life.
I'm most familiar with the medieval period, so I'll use that to illustrate some examples of technological advancement. I won't be able to say how different your grandparents lives were from the people in the middle ages, but I can illustrate how different medieval peoples' agriculture would have been from their forebears.
There are a few very prominent examples of changes in agricultural technology during the middle ages. The first, and probably most widely known, is the heavy plough. The plough is fundamentally a tool to dig a trench that you can plant seeds in. Originally, people used hand-hoes or digging sticks to do this, which is very labour intensive. Later, people began using draft animals, which would drag a blade through the ground, creating a trench to put seeds in. The heavy plough was essentially a deeper blade that was also shaped to turn soil as it moved through it. This had several advantages. First, it allowed for farming in areas with more robust soil than previously - which widely expanded the arable area of Northern Europe. Second, it would turn weeds back down into the soil, where they could decompose, providing nutrients for future plants.
Another innovation was the horse collar - which was something that allowed a horse to efficiently pull a plough. Before this development, oxen had been the primary draft animal in Europe. Horses were more trainable and quicker to work with, so being able to use them for draft allowed for quicker ploughing, and thus the ability to plant and maintain more land with fewer resources.
Medieval people were also the first to attach wheels to ploughs, which, as you can imagine, also significantly sped up the process.
None of these technologies existed before circa 1000 CE, so those were significant changes in agricultural technology from ancient times. It sounds like your grandparents didn't have some of these things, which has to do with the relative value of labour (is it cheaper to have a person out there with a stick, or to invest in a plough?).
So here we have some examples of technological advances in agriculture. But here's the interesting part. What do these actually do for the people using them? They allow fewer people to produce more food in less time. And what do you do with that extra food? This surplus problem is at the root of basically every agricultural culture in history. Essentially you have a couple of options:
The mix of those options probably did more to determine quality of life in an agrarian society than efficiency of production, per se. But there are huge tradeoffs for all of them. Work less? You'll probably get driven off your land by other people who have more kids, and thus more population. Have more kids? Your surplus doesn't lead to better quality of life, and you often lose people when unexpected famine occurs. Trade for services? Your quality of life again might decline somewhat, and you probably become more specialized, more reliant on the people around you, and less self-sufficient. And of course, for almost the entire history of agriculture there has been someone willing to tax your agricultural production (often ostensibly for services such as divine intervention (priests) or protection (warrior class or hereditary nobility) - the degree these services were worthwhile to you would depend on a lot.
So interestingly, over the course of the middle ages and into the early modern period, you had progressively improving agricultural production. But you also had, by some measures such as average height, progressively decreasing quality of life from the late middle ages through the early modern period (with punctuated periods of equilibrium or improvement, like after a plague when you had more bargaining power as an agrarian worker and fewer people in society to feed). This is largely because the share of agrarian product that agrarian workers managed to keep declined.
EDITS:
Clarified the difference between trade and taxes, added a bit trying to more directly answer the question.
Added strikethrough to portion regarding quality of life and trade, see comment by u/WhyAreSurgeonsAllMDs below.