Farm My School
Transforming underutilised school grounds into regenerative farms that tackle food insecurity and build stronger communities.
Farm My School turns underutilised school grounds into regenerative market gardens that produce fresh food, deliver hands-on education, and strengthen local food systems in regional communities. By integrating farming into the school curriculum and community life, the program addresses food insecurity, reconnects students with the land, and creates viable career pathways in sustainable agriculture. Their model proves schools can be hubs of health, education, and environmental resilience – one school at a time.
2025 Pitch
Funds Raised: $82,400
Pitched at Healthy People Healthy Planet event for funding to establish its proven regenerative farming model at Colac Secondary College, a regional community where youth face high levels of food insecurity and poor nutrition. The support will enable leadership, coordination, and foundational capacity to transform school grounds into a 2-hectare market garden that supplies fresh produce, delivers hands-on STEAM education, and builds food literacy across 700 students and their families. This expansion will also create youth employment through farmer traineeships and demonstrate the model’s scalability as a systemic solution to food education and community wellbeing.
6 Month Impact
12 Month Impact
The funding supported:
The funds raised at the TFN event helped to support the organisational capacity required to establish Farm My School at Colac Secondary College. This was their second site, and the first genuine test of whether their model travels beyond the community that grew it. TFN's support funded CEO capacity, project coordination and management, their community education and engagement program, and the beginnings of the Farmer Incubator program in Colac.
Here is what that capacity made possible.
• A community that built its own farm. Around 700 community members worked together across 24 hours at the Colac Build a Farm in a Day to build two linear kilometres of garden beds - an extraordinary show of local appetite to be part of the farm before a single vegetable had even been planted.
• A working regenerative market garden. Between late February and early July 2026, the farm produced and harvested 2,413kg of fresh, seasonal vegetables - everything from zucchini and tomatoes in high summer through to kale, fennel, brussels sprouts and rhubarb as the season turned to winter - all tracked crop by crop through our harvest log.
• Food reaching Colac families. Our veg box has recorded 251 individual sales across 19 weeks of trading, with the great majority of customers returning week on week - a strong early signal that Colac families are building fresh, local veg into their regular routine rather than treating it as a one-off. Sales more than doubled, from 9 to 25 in a single week, once we began advertising through Colac Secondary College's Compass platform: a simple, replicable lesson in how institutional channels can shift affordability and availability at once.
• Learning embedded in the school. Classes at the farm grew from four to five a week in Term 1 to nine or ten a week in Term 2, spanning Agriculture, Science, Humanities, Food Technology, Wellbeing Hands on Learning, the Year 10 Farm My School elective and Year 11/12 Vocational Major cohorts. The farm has also hosted whole-school visits, teacher professional development, a First Nations cohort gathering and a Food and Mood session delivered with a Deakin University researcher for Mental Health Week.
• A local food economy taking shape. Merivale restaurant has purchased weekly since mid-April, our Sunday Roast collaboration has run since early May, and Surf Hotel in Torquay has placed its first orders. We buy potatoes and onions from Casuarina Farm, garlic from The Paddock, and sell into Soli Farm's stall at Torquay Farmers Market - a genuinely reciprocal producer network built on regenerative and biodynamic principles.
• A community that keeps turning up. Our weekly volunteer program has logged roughly 580 volunteer hours this reporting period, contributed by a committed core of around 16 local volunteers, several of whom attend almost every week.
• Governance built to last. A Project Steering Group now brings together Farm My School, Colac Secondary College, Colac Area Health and Colac Otway Shire Council, with facilitated strategy sessions held in May and July 2026.
Every farm they build expands the evidence, strengthens the model and brings us one step closer to a future where every school has the opportunity to nourish, educate and connect its community. TFN's investment is a direct part of that evidence base.
Impact Story:
Aster came to the Colac farm for one week of Year 10 work experience. One week is not long - but on a farm, a week is a season in miniature: beds to prepare, crops to harvest, produce to wash, pack and send out to families across town. By the start of Term 3, Aster had begun a School-Based Apprenticeship and Traineeship. What started as a scheduled work placement has become a genuine vocational pathway into regenerative farming, in a region where the average Australian farmer is now 60 and young people are leaving agriculture at alarming rates.
This is the Farmer Incubator model working to support young people developing lifelong knowledge, skills and confidence in growing, preparing and valuing healthy food - and finding, in the soil, a reason to stay engaged with their education and their community.
Learn more about Farm My School
Supporting Sustainable Development Goals:
