Patrick Doyle has been named president of King Milling Co., a family-owned and operated flour miller in Lowell, Mich.

He replaces his cousin Jim Doyle, who turned 65 in May and will now serve as the company’s executive vice chairman.

Patrick Doyle is the fifth generation of his family to lead King Milling and first joined the company in 2003. He has served as executive vice president of the multigenerational family-owned business since 2022, focusing on the company’s management, sales and financial operations.

In April, King Milling celebrated the completion of the country’s most modern flour mill, which is capable of producing 800,000 pounds of flour a day.

New pesticide certification website now online

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development has launched a newly updated Pesticide Certification website. The site has been reorganized for easier access to essential online resources and to ensure compliance with current state and federal pesticide safety regulations.

MDARD provides 9 grants for food safety programs

Nine recipients will receive more than $300,000 in 2024-25 Food Safety Education Fund grants from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

The FSEF grant program puts funds into the hands of those with direct contact with restaurant and retail grocery store workers who handle food, and with consumers. The grant program is designed to provide food safety training and education to consumers, and training and education to food service employees and agents of the director who enforce Michigan’s food regulations.

MDARD received 15 grant proposals requesting funds totaling $464,344. The department awarded $312,203 to nine projects.

The 2024-2025 Food Safety Education Fund grant recipients are:

Food safety resources for consumers and food industry professionals, including materials developed from Food Safety Education Fund grants in previous years, can be found at michiganfoodsafety.com or michigan.gov/foodsafety. For more information, contact the MDARD Food and Dairy Division at 800-292-3939.

MSU receives grant to study carbon impacts

As carbon offset projects and programs continue growing, it’s unknown what extent their impacts will have on forest management practices and wood products harvested for forest product industries, in addition to the scope at which harvesting is substituted from one region to another, resulting in leakage.

“As more forests enroll in these carbon offset programs, our team is going to evaluate what will happen to the wood supply and forest product industries,” says Raju Pokharel, a researcher at Michigan State University who received an $800,000 grant from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture for the study.

“What will happen to trade? Are we going to import more or export more wood? Is the price of wood going to go up or down? And if one forest enrolls in a carbon offset program, will another forest in a different part of the country harvest more wood to meet that demand? What would be the amount of leakage? These are all questions we’re going to answer through this project.”

Pokharel, an assistant professor in the MSU Department of Forestry, will lead a team looking at how the supply chain of wood products is connected across states and regions and how carbon offset programs affect wood flow, forest investments and raw material sourcing for forest product industries.

Modeling and analysis from the project will be carried out at a national scale to account for interstate and interregional reliance on forest product industries, including in the mountain, Northeast, Northwest and Southern regions.

Along with MSU, Colorado State University, Oklahoma State University and the University of Idaho are partners on the project.