On July 22, The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development announced a $450 thousand dollar grant has been awarded to Star of the West Milling Company to help build a new dry corn mill in the Branch County village of Quincy.
The corn mill will replace a historic wheat flour mill in Quincy owned by Star of the West that was demolished in January. The wheat mill was built in 1863 and owned by Star of the West since 1979. Star of the West Flour Milling President Mike Fassezke said the aging infrastructure could no longer be safely operated — but several facilities on the site were still in good shape.
“We built a very large, modern flour mill 75 miles south [of Quincy] in Ligonier, Indiana. And with that build, we decided to decommission the Quincy wheat flour mill. And we did that on January 1st of 2026. But the site contains, or is home for a significant grain storage operation,” Fassezke said. “We can store about 1.3 million bushels of grain there on site. And a couple of years ago when we were working through this plan, we started to think, how can we repurpose that Quincy site.”
MDARD director Tim Boring said the department is excited to see the mill being repurposed. He said it will help meet industry demands across the state.
“Seeing a dry corn mill like this go in, it certainly gives farmers in the area some advantages to capture additional revenue. To grow something a little bit different that's going to go into a high quality food grade product like this. It’s just a broader piece of us continuing to support economic activity all across the state,” Boring said.
Fassezke said construction is already underway and the mill is expected to be operational by 2028. It's estimated to cost around $80 million. Fassezke said Star of the West is aiming to fill a gap in the corn milling industry.
"Corn milling is really concentrated west of Michigan. You get out into Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri. And then if you go down into the southeast: Georgia, the Carolinas, you'll find some dry corn mills. But there are no dry corn mills in the state of Michigan. There are no commercial dry corn mills in Ontario, and there are no dry corn mills in the Northeast quadrant of the United States up in the New England area," Fassezke said. “We’ll have a significant logistics advantage to be able to ship corn products east of here because of our location."
Currently, Fassezke said star of the West ships corn, but not any corn products. He said the corn mill will allow them to provide better options for buyers in the Northeast and expand their product offerings.
“We also handle about 15 million bushels of corn currently that all we do is aggregate and ship to the southeast for feed, or we also ship it into the ethanol industry. But we don't add any value to it. We don't convert it into anything else. We just ship it as corn. And this will give us an opportunity to take some of that corn that we currently handle. And create some value added products by converting it to food,” Fassezke said.
Additionally, Fassezke said the corn mill would allow Star of the West to restore jobs that were lost when the Quincy wheat flour mill closed.
“When we discontinued operations, we laid off about 17 people, and we had never laid anyone off in the in the history of the company,” Fassezke said. “It was a hardship for not only for those that we laid off, but also for us that had to make the decision and do the layoffs.”
The corn mill is projected to create around 17 new jobs, which would replace the jobs eliminated by the wheat mill closure.
