Look, in war times, we can plant potatoes in all our gardens and take our spare meadows. We don't need these farmers in peace time; we really don't. They are leeches.
Tiny little farms like that wouldn't be a huge amount of food. It's vastly inefficient compared to a huge factory farm and you can just summon up the tractors and watering infrastructure to properly run a farm.
Tell that to those who lived under the Soviet collective laws. They were allowed something like 1/2 acre to grow food for their families. Those little patches produced a significant amount of the food that wasn't grown on the collective farms.
Of course, a lot of that had to do with incentives....
Oh you can totally feed your family with a half acre. If you're good at it you can feed several families.
If you only grow and eat potatoes, you can feed 7 people 2000 Calorie/day diets all year. That's the figure if you grow potatoes like big potato farmers. If you nurture the land and integrate other species taking advantage of differing growing seasons and do all you can to make perfect soil conditions, you can get a lot more out of it than potatoes every day for 7.
Some places can - if you have huge gardens and areas you're free to make use of. Many can't.
Norwegian farming policy is focused on maintaining near-independence in the food supply because the British embargo during the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800's is still seared in the collective consciousness. E.g. every Norwegian primary school child will go through the very long, very tedious poem "Terje Vigen" about a man who tried to evade the British embargo by taking a small boat to Denmark to get food to feed his starving family.
Starvation happened despite farming most of the available land.
The concern of local food production rose to prominence again during World War II, when German occupation meant strict rationing, which led to "fun" food innovation such as flour substitute made from bark, as growing vegetables etc. in your back garden simply doesn't produce enough for most people to sustain a family.
That's not the only reason for Norwegian farming policy. Another is to ensure that non-industrial areas and areas where it is simply difficult to live do not become entirely depopulated. I live and work and pay tax in Norway and I am quite happy with the basic principle that the country should produce most of its own food; it helps to reduce the tendency to race to the bottom of the market and, if done well, promotes pride in quality. Of course it is not easy to export the Norwegian experience to a much larger country like the US with a different political system and much higher concentration of ownership of the farms and also difficult to export it to a smaller much more densely populated country like the UK. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth trying to learn from it.
Don't mistake me, I'm not claiming that Norwegian farming policy is perfect, merely that it does seem to work at the moment.
There's a full English translation here [1] with details on Ibsens likely sources of inspiration, if you want to read it. It feels a lot longer when you're 9-10 years old...
But here's a summary of the end:
He is released from prison at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and comes home to find his wife and child died while he was in prison, and were buried in a paupers grave.
Years later he comes across a ship in distress and it is the captain of the British ship that caught him, with his family. He threatens revenge, but on picking up the child changes his mind and saves all of them.
