Dervaes and his three adult children operated an urban market garden in Pasadena, California, as well as other websites and online stores related to self-sufficiency and "adapting in place."
While there, he became a beekeeper and subsistent farmer, complete with poultry and small livestock, living a simpler life and starting a family.
Dervaes and his family moved back to the Tampa Bay area in 1975, to a 10-acre plot in rural Pasco County, Florida.
Dervaes started experimenting with self-sufficiency while he lived in New Zealand and later in Florida, then decided to see how efficient he could make an urban homestead in Pasadena, California, USA.
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.
[5] The Dervaes family was featured on National Geographic Channel's Doomsday Preppers in 2012 and briefly appeared in a trailer for the show.
[7] In 2008, Dervaes operated websites promoting prophecies of the "end times" and criticizing the Worldwide Church of God's (WCG) doctrinal changes from 1995.
[15] On 21 February 2011, Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which is representing Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, Los Angeles-based authors of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City, and publisher Process Media), sent a response to the Dervaes Institute and published the letter on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website.
[19] On December 27, 2016, via their Facebook page and website, urbanhomestead.org, Dervaes' children, Anais, Justin and Jordanne, announced that their father had died as a result of a pulmonary embolism at the age of 69.