RELOCALIZING THE FUTURE | Little Homestead in the City

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August 29, 2008

The thing that so impresses me about Jules is that he has not allowed himself to be limited in his thinking. Who would have thought that an individual could do what he’s doing in the amount of land that he has? If you read the textbooks about urban farming, they’ll all prescribe the amount of production you can get per square foot of land. What he does totally blows away everything that’s in the books. So, he shows us, once again, over and over again, that we shouldn’t believe what we read necessarily. It’s good for guidance, but it’s not good for prescription. We need to get out of our boxes and realize that we can do much more ourselves. At the end of the day, it’s dependent on us, it’s not dependent on the government to change things.

Business Matters Radio Show

… we talk to Jules Dervaes. Jules and his 3 adult children are true practitioners of relocalization.

They have developed on 1/10 an acre near downtown Pasadena, Ca a sustainable micro-farm that produces 6000 pounds of food per year. This is something that all the “experts” say is impossible. They sell part of the produce to local restaurants. They also have a number of home-based businesses that support them.

to the radio interview ( 13 minutes)

About Jules Dervaes

Jules Dervaes is the founder of Path to Freedom, a family-operated, viable urban homestead project established in 2001 to promote a simpler and more fulfilling lifestyle and to sow a “homegrown revolution(tm)” against the corporate powers that control the food supply.

Since the mid-1980s, Mr. Dervaes and his three adult children, Anaïs, Justin, and Jordanne, have steadily worked at transforming their ordinary city lot in Pasadena, CA, into a thriving organic garden that supplies them with food all year round. These eco-pioneers also run a successful business providing fresh produce to local restaurants. This helps them fund their purchases of solar panels, energy-efficient appliances, and a biodiesel processor to further decrease their homestead’s reliance on the earth’s non-renewable resources.

The family has been the subject of numerous articles in newspapers around the world, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), and was recently featured on ABC’s Nightline and CNN.