Particle textures for blocks don't work for blocks from Forestry and some other mods I know. There should be a hook to change what the textures are for the particles the block will have when you break it or sprint on it.

 

It also bugged me personally as a modder when the particles from my mod block were taken from the bottom texture and it looked ugly, and I wished I could set them to be taken from another texture.

I can do digging and breaking, but sprinting is a bit odd, it isnt actually tied down to the actual tile location without a lot of hackary, we cant get the location of the tile.

https://github.com/MinecraftForge/MinecraftForge/commit/c2d53e76514d04ca1649f751ea20b5def9397725

How exactly would I use this to make the particles based off the top texture instead?

 

EDIT: This is unrelated, but how do I remove a vanilla recipe? I know it has something to do with CraftingManager but I don't know how to remove a recipe from the mod file.

Read the code and find out.