Who’s Who in Green: The Dervaes Family

In response to genetically engineered food, grown thousands of miles away from where it will be consumed and doused in chemicals, a rallying cry spread across the country – a homegrown revolution. People have begun to realize that the ultimate way to take control over their own food is to grow it themselves – even if all they have to grow on is 1/10th of an acre in a town like Pasadena, California.

The Dervaes family – father Jules, son Justin and daughters Anais and Jordanne – have inspired people around the world to start their own urban homesteads with their ‘Path to Freedom’ project, which has transformed a humble home with a small, concrete-covered lot in the suburbs into a prolific organic farm that not only grows enough food to meet the family’s needs but to sell to area businesses, as well.

It all started with a simple goal: to reduce the family’s water bills. Jules Dervaes, who had previously grown food and raised bees on family properties in New Zealand and Florida, decided to rip out the dead front lawn and replace it with thick mulch and wildflowers in response to the severe California drought of the 1990s. Slowly but surely, the family began ripping up more grass and replacing it with edibles instead – fruits, vegetables, beans, herbs and nasturtiums.

Soon enough, the family began to see the project as a challenge: how much food could they grow? How much money could they save? They took on a voluntarily simple, self-sufficient lifestyle, dedicating themselves to living green. Today, their little homestead in the city – which boasts solar panels, a range of hand-powered appliances, a solar outdoor shower, a cob oven and an enclosure full of goats, ducks and chickens – serves as an inspiration for millions of people interested in starting their own urban homesteads.

The Dervaes homestead produces an amazing 6,000 pounds of food annually in their 66’x66’ backyard. They grow over 350 different vegetables, herbs, and fruits, gather honey from their beehives, and eat the hundreds of eggs provided each year by their chickens and ducks. The family’s carbon footprint is impressive – they brew their own biodiesel (for a car that rarely gets used), consume just 6.5 kWh of energy a day, eat seasonally (and vegetarian), make their own compost, buy secondhand and make almost all of their food from scratch.

Their website, PathtoFreedom.com, offers tips and information about small-scale farms as well as a journal that documents the goings-on at the Dervaes homestead. They have also created the site FreedomGardens.org, which offers freedom gardeners a place to gather, share photos and information and network with each other. The Dervaes also have an online store, the Peddler’s Wagon, where you can purchase many of the items they use themselves on a daily basis, and they’ve started their own seed company as well.

The family is also the focus of a new 52-minute documentary called Homegrown, which will be screening at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and has made their own 15-minute film entitled ‘Homegrown Revolution’ that will be screening at the Green Lifestyle Film Festival in LA (March 13th-15th). Check out the trailer, below.

Jules, Justin, Anais and Jordanne have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s entirely possible to subsist on what your own tiny parcel of land can provide, no matter where you live.

Dervaes Family’s Green Score: 38,998

The Organic vs. Intensive Farming Debate

As consumers cut back on spending this year, will higher-priced organic foods look less appealing? In case you’re starting to hesitate in the grocery aisle, here’s a little refresher course on why organics are not only better for our bodies but also for our environment.

According to IFOAM,

organic agriculture:

• enhances soil structures
• conserves water
• mitigates climate change
• ensures sustained biodiversity

conventional agriculture:

• employs harmful inorganic fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides
• increases the suffocation of aquatic plants and animals due to rapid growth of algae
• spreads toxic dosages of herbicides and insecticides up the food chain to humans

Prisons Go Green with Organic Farming, Composting, Recycling

A beekeeper carefully tends his honeybees, while in the background, a man in an orange suit stirs compost with a pitchfork. Three more men are bent over in the garden, pulling weeds and checking on the tomatoes. It would be an idyllic scene, if not for the presence of towering chain-link fences and guards with guns. This isn’t a rural farm; it’s a prison.

Cedar Creek Corrections Center in southwest Washington grew 8,000 pounds of organic veggies this year, composted 100% of their food scraps and even recycled shoe scraps into playground turf. Inmates at this minimum-security prison get fresh air and exercise, and the prison saves money by implementing practically every green initiative they can think of.

From MSNBC:

“It reduces cost, reduces our damaging impact on the environment, engages inmates as students,” said Eldon Vail, secretary of the Washington Department of Corrections, which oversees 15 prisons and 18,000 offenders. “It’s good security.”

As around-the-clock operations, prisons are voracious resource hogs, and administrators are under increasing pressure to reduce waste and conserve energy and water.

In 2007, states spent more than $49 billion to feed, house, clothe, treat and supervise 2.3 million offenders, the Pew Center on the States reported this year.

Cedar Creek is far from the only prison to be using sustainability to their financial advantage. The Indiana Department of Corrections installed water boilers that run on wood chips and built a wind turbine that generates about 10 kilowatts per hour. Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, CA has 6,200 solar panels that feed energy back into the grid, and North Carolina’s Department of Corrections had inmates turn 50-gallon pickle barrels into rain cisterns.

What a smart idea – with as much money as states spend on prisons, this is a huge help in so many ways. Why not take it a step further, and train inmates for green collar jobs? Of course, we’d like to see law-abiding citizens get that opportunity first, but it’s an idea for the future.

Link [MSNBC]

Will Allen is officially a GENIUS

This year, urban farmer Will Allen was named a MacArthur Fellow. Informally known as the “genius award”, the Fellowship is a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and promise to do more. As the CEO of Growing Power, Will Allen has been working  to support community food systems from the local to international level.

From their website:

Growing Power transforms communities by supporting people from diverse backgrounds and the environments in which they live through the development of Community Food Systems.  These systems provide high-quality, safe, healthy, affordable food for all residents in the community.

Keep up the great work Will!