MDARD, MI Commission of Agriculture and Rural Development Award $275,000 in Grant Funding

May 21, 2026

The Michigan Commission of Agriculture and Rural Development voted today to approve $275,000 in Food and Agriculture Investment Program (FAIP) grant funding to fairlife, LLC. The funding, awarded by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD), will allow the business to complete an expansion project that will help meet consumer demand and create 150 new jobs.

"MDARD continues to leverage its grant programs to bolster economic growth in Michigan's food and agriculture industry," said MDARD Director Tim Boring. "The Food and Agriculture Investment Program supports crucial improvements in processing capacity and helps create new jobs and opportunities in communities throughout our state."

The FAIP funding will be used as part of a $650 million investment project that will expand fairlife's Coopersville facility. The project will add two new high-speed production lines using fairlife s patented ultrafiltration technology and expand the plant by more than 245,000 square feet.

"We are honored that MDARD continues to believe in fairlife and our growth story in Michigan and has awarded us a performance-based grant through the Food and Agriculture Investment Program," said Phil LaMothe, SVP, Engineering & Manufacturing Operations, fairlife. "This investment reflects our shared commitment to the future of Michigan, and we are excited to further invest in the growth of the dairy industry across the state."

fairlife, LLC is a nutrition company that produces dairy-based products, including fairlife ultra-filtered milk, Core Power and fairlife Nutrition Plan protein shakes. Today, fairlife employs more than 1,000 workers across the country including more than 400 in Michigan. fairlife is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Coca-Cola Company.

The Coopersville facility sources over 6 million pounds of raw milk per day from more than 30 Michigan dairy farms. The completed expansion is expected to increase milk intake by up to four million pounds per day, a more than 60 percent increase. This projected increase creates significant new market opportunities for Michigan farmers, strengthens revenues and supports long-term farm sustainability

Source : michigan.gov

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids