Jules Dervaes JR 1947-2016

Jules Dervaes came of age during the turmoil of the late 1960s. Anxious for the future of his family, he moved to New Zealand in 1973, where he homesteaded in an abandoned gold mining town and trained as a beekeeper. After returning to the U.S., he lived on 10 acres in central Florida. He was a free thinker, inventive, creative — a true old-fashioned pioneer but one constantly searching the future.

He was a self-employed entrepreneur throughout most of his adult life in a series of successful startups from beekeeping and naturally-produced honey, to low environmental impact landscaping and lawn maintenance. A former schoolteacher with a degree in math, Jules Dervaes eventually found himself stuck in the wasteland of Los Angeles despite wanting to find a self-sufficient farm somewhere to escape to. Behind the plaid shirts and the gray hair lives a progressive change-maker who got angry about the GMOs invading the food supply.  His solution — grow his own food and say to heck with the supermarkets and the over processed so called food that was being shopped to the public.

Homestead Journey

In 1973, with a briefcase whose only contents were the first 13 issues of Mother Earth News, he immigrated to New Zealand, believing that such an isolated, egalitarian society could assist him and his family in living a more integrated, meaningful life.  In small town called “Stafford” on the west coast of New Zealand’s rural South Island (near Hokitika),  Jules embarked on the path towards self-sufficiency and began his homesteading journey. He became a beekeeper, grew his own food, kept chickens, ducks and goats, collected rain water for his family’s water supply and lived without most modern conveniences.

But a series of events and circumstances eventually brought Jules and his young family back to Tampa, Florida in 1975, where they lived on 10 acres in the country surrounded by pastures and orange groves. In this new location, Jules re-established his beekeeping business, started a lawn maintenance business and resumed gardening, while sometimes teaching at local schools.

In 1984, the family made another move, this time to Pasadena, California, where Jules re-entered college and achieved an additional degree in theology. While residing in Pasadena, he continued hobby gardening and beekeeping in varying degrees over the years.

Jules still longed for the simpler life and the dependence on the land he had in New Zealand. He planned to “one day” return to that lifestyle and recreate what he had lost. Acquiring the acreage to rebuild that dream proved to be difficult, however. Circumstances, situations, and distractions continually thwarted attempts of a return to country life. And so, Jules and his family continued to dream of “one day” finding “freedom” by returning to the land.