Let's start with the crops:

The main crop cultivated at the time was wheat, which is a very land/capital intensive crops to grow, and in smaller quantities, especially near the coast, more labour intensive crops like lemons, olives and vines. Animal husbandry was also practiced and consisted mostly in the husbandry of goats, sheeps and cattle and was for the most part pastorialist.

Where grain was cultivated lands were increasingly owned by bourgeois latifondist employed daily labourers to work the land, those daily labourers had no job security and often compensated by cultivating small plots of land rented from big landlords. On hills and mountains land owned by large landlords, both bourgeois and feudal, was divided in small plots and leased to farmes using sharecropping contracts, that is asking part of the products as payment ("mezzadria" in italian) that cultivated "inferior cereals" or practiced animal husbandry. This was different were labour intensive crops were grown as small independent ownership was more common.

Mechanization was completely absent and in many ways agricolture lagged severely in regards to british or american agriculture at the time. Labour conditions were poor and farmers had little political representation with no trade unions for agriculture workers in the south (while the north experienced the first peasant strikes and protest, particulary well known is that of the mondine, seasonal workers in rice production). Children were extensively used in agriculture and thus were not allowed to get an education (despite the introduction of mandatory education with the legge casati of 1859 (before unification, then extended to all of italy) and legge coppino of 1877. Living conditions were poor and, as noted before, contracts were usually daily for labourers and yearly for sharecropping making it difficult to plan for the long time.

It's worth noting that in many areas land was grown innefficiently using outdated techniques and favouring stable rent over profit driven cultivation; in particular many economist and historians have noted how damaging was the prevalence of grain (land-capital intensive ideal for places like the US or russia) in a land with the opposite endorsment of factors of production (very high population, not a lot of land or capital).