New urban farming project to increase food access

The hardworking staff and volunteers for FareShare(Opens in a new tab/window) and SecondBite(Opens in a new tab/window) aim to grow more food for people in need. Their new Dingley Farm opened on Thursday 9 April. We are proud to fund SecondBite’s efforts to address food insecurity, with the support of FareShare.

The existing FareShare farms in Melbourne are already growing more than 100,000 kg of food every year. With the addition of the new Dingley Farm, the team hopes to increase growth to more than 300,000 kg of produce a year.

After harvest, the fresh vegetables are taken into the FareShare kitchen. There, they are turned into nutritious ready-to-eat meals. These are distributed through their wide network of charity partners to people facing hardship.

The FareShare kitchens produce around 3.2 million meals a year. With the extra produce grown on the new Dingley Farm, they hope to increase meal production by another million meals a year.

Garden Program Manager Isabel Menssink said the new farm will triple the volume of produce they can grow. It will allow FareShare to provide more meals to their charity partners around Australia.

‘At a very fundamental level, we all just want everyone to be nourished,’ she said. ‘We had some people from a local charity who have come out to the farm and shared how much it brightened a time in their life when they really needed it.’

‘It’s really amazing to have a site that over the years we’ve tinkered with and changed our systems to work better with our volunteers,’ Menssink said. ‘We needed the investment to be able to improve those areas.’

At the new Dingley Farm, they have been able to tailor the site for their operational needs. This includes more machinery to wash the produce and an undercover area for the volunteers to have morning tea.

FareShare operates Australia’s largest non-profit kitchens in Melbourne and Brisbane. Chefs and volunteers transform rescued and donated food into delicious, nutritious meals. Produce grown on their own farms helps them provide millions of meals for people in need. SecondBite was born out of a realisation that perfectly healthy, edible food was being discarded by farmers and retailers. At the same time, millions of people faced hunger through food insecurity. 

These organisations merged in 2024 to combine their efforts to combat food insecurity in Australia.

We are proud to fund SecondBite to deliver food relief (and material aid) under our Financial Wellbeing and Capability Activity.

Learn more about Supporting people in financial crises.