User:SharQ/Jules Dervaes

Jules Dervaes is an eco-pioneer, and a prominent supporter and evangelist of alternative lifestyles - specifically, he is one of the principal protagonists in the current wave of urban homesteading movement, where people promote ethical living and to reduce their impact on the environment by producing all or part of their food themselves.

Dervaes also runs Path to Freedom, a popular website about self-sufficiency and urban gardening.

Self-sufficient in the city
Dervaes only has a fifth of an acre of space at his house in urban Pasadena, California, but despite the diminutive area of his urban homestead, Jules and his family are able to raise three tonnes of food every year; an amount which equals 75% of their annual food needs , and helps them an organic produce business, as well.

Dervaeses started expermenting with self-sufficiency while he lived in New Zealand and in Florida, USA, but settled in Pasadena, where he decided to try and see how efficient an urban homestead could become. According to Natural Home Magazine, "The Dervaeses’ operation is about 60 to 150 times as efficient as their industrial competitors, without relying on chemical fertilizers and pesticides." .

In addition to growing a significant amount of food on their property, the Derveas family are striving to live off-grid as far as possible, and have invested significant amounts of money in order to be able to experiment with other ways of attaining self-sufficiency. Their property, for example, has 12 solar panels on the roof, a biodiesel filling station in the garage and a solar oven in the backyard, and their kitchen uses a number of hand-cranked appliances to save on power consumption.

Working to spread the message
The Dervaes family have taken the distinctly low-tech world of urban farming into the current millennium by running detailed blogs and websites about their exploits, experimentations and findings; blogs and websites which are very popular indeed: Their family-run Path to Freedom site gets five million hits per month from over 125 different countries. , and generates a stream of requests and queries from people who also wish to break free of the supermarket's clutches.

The Dervaes family was subject of a documentary film titled HomeGrown: The 21st Century Family Farm, directed by Robert McFalls which was released to critical acclaim in 2008, and has become a popular companion-movie to Al Gore's An Convenient Truth , serving as an example of one of the things one can do to help the environment.