ForFarmers N.V. (FFARM.AS) - Deep Dive Research Report

Euronext Amsterdam | Consumer Defensive / Animal Nutrition | Report date: 2026-06-15

Section 1: What the Company Does

ForFarmers makes and sells animal feed. Specifically, it buys raw materials (grains, soy, by-products from the food industry, minerals, vitamins) and turns them into compound feed - the pelleted or meal-form rations that pig, dairy, beef, and poultry farmers feed their animals every day. It sells roughly 10.6 million tonnes of this stuff a year across the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom, which makes it the largest compound-feed producer in Europe by volume.

The business is genuinely unglamorous and that is the point. A dairy farmer with 150 cows needs a precise, consistent ration delivered to the silo on the farm, week in and week out, calibrated to the milk yield he is chasing, the forage he already has in stock, and the price of milk that month. Get the formulation slightly wrong and the cows produce less milk or fall ill; deliver late and the farmer runs out. ForFarmers' value proposition is that it does this reliably, at scale, with nutritional advice attached. The company brands this the "Total Feed" approach: not just selling a bag of pellets, but supplying compound feed, young-animal feed, specialty feed, liquid co-products, raw materials, seeds, and on-farm nutritional and business advice as a package. The advice is the wedge that makes the commodity sticky.

The founding story explains the structure. ForFarmers traces back to 1896, when livestock farmers in the eastern Netherlands banded together as a cooperative (Boerenbond Borne) to buy raw materials and produce feed collectively - the classic agricultural-cooperative model where the farmers who use the feed also own the supplier. The cooperative grew by merger and acquisition for a century. In 2007 the ownership and the operating business were deliberately split: the farmer-members were grouped into Coöperatie FromFarmers, and the operating company became ForFarmers N.V., which listed on Euronext Amsterdam in 2016. This was done to free the company to expand internationally and raise capital while keeping the farmer-cooperative as the anchor shareholder. That heritage still shapes the business: the cooperative remains the largest single shareholder and holds a special "priority share," and the customer base and the ownership base overlap.

What ForFarmers used to be was a Dutch-and-UK feed miller riding a structurally shrinking home market. What it is becoming is a more geographically balanced European feed group that is pushing into poultry value-chain integration in Poland - a deliberate pivot away from its declining Dutch pig and dairy base toward a growth market.

CEO Pieter Wolleswinkel, FY2025 results call (Feb 19, 2026): "2025 can be seen as a record year when we talk about volumes, when we talk about net profit."

A concrete example of the product in action: a poultry farmer in Poland places a standing order for broiler grower feed. ForFarmers' nutritionists formulate the ration to hit a target growth curve at lowest cost given current grain and soy prices (least-cost formulation is a constant optimisation problem). The mill in Poland produces the feed, it is delivered by bulk tanker to the farm silo, and a ForFarmers adviser monitors flock performance and adjusts the next order. In the new Polish joint venture, ForFarmers will also own a stake in the farms and the slaughtering operation, so the same bird is fed, raised, and processed within one integrated chain.

Section 2: Business Segments

ForFarmers reports along geographic clusters rather than species, because feed is a local, logistics-bound business (you cannot economically truck bulk feed across a continent). The species - ruminant (dairy/beef), swine, and poultry - cut across every cluster. The clusters are The Netherlands, Germany & Poland (continental Europe), and the United Kingdom.

The Netherlands

This is the historic heartland and still a large share of group volume, spanning all species but heavily weighted to dairy and pigs. The core capability here is a century of formulation know-how, a dense mill-and-logistics network close to one of the most intensive livestock regions in the world, and the trust relationship with farmer-customers, many of whom are also members of the owning cooperative. The 2024 acquisition of Van Triest Veevoeders, a specialist in co-products (by-products from the food and bio-ethanol industries used as cheap, sustainable feed ingredients), strengthened this cluster's raw-material edge.

The strategic problem is that the Dutch market is structurally shrinking. Government nitrogen-reduction policy and farm buy-out schemes are deliberately reducing the national livestock herd, and FEFAC forecasts Dutch pig-feed production to fall roughly 10% in 2025 alone. ForFarmers' own framing is that it is "increasing market share in a contracting market" - it is winning a bigger slice of a shrinking pie. Management says it gained share across all species in the Netherlands in 2025. This cluster is the cash cow that is slowly draining, and the entire group strategy is built around offsetting its decline elsewhere.

Germany & Poland (Continental Europe)

This is the growth engine. Germany was reshaped in 2025 by a joint venture (the "team agrar" JV) that was consolidated into the group, and Poland has become the strategic centrepiece. ForFarmers entered Poland with the acquisition of Tasomix and then Piast, building a position in a poultry market that is growing while Western Europe shrinks. In 2025 combined Germany-and-Poland volumes jumped 38.7% on the JV consolidation, and Poland delivered strongly despite avian-influenza disruption.

The core capability ForFarmers is assembling here is vertical integration. The announced ForFarmers Polska joint venture with KPS Food Group combines Tasomix's feed mills with KPS's poultry farms, slaughtering, and processing into one chain, with ForFarmers taking a 50.5% controlling stake. The combined entity is valued at an enterprise value of PLN 2,192 million (roughly €520 million); KPS brings about 2,000 employees, roughly €252 million of turnover, and roughly €46 million of EBITDA, plus seven modern poultry farms with around 3 million bird places. This is a different economic model from the rest of the group: instead of selling feed to independent farmers, ForFarmers will own the bird, the feed, and the processing margin. Management's rationale is explicit:

"By joining forces, we create a strong, integrated approach with the birds, with the feed, with the slaughtering activities." - Pieter Wolleswinkel, FY2025 call (Feb 19, 2026)

This cluster exists separately because it has different economics (growth vs. decline), a different competitive set (Polish and German feed players), and now a fundamentally different business model (integration vs. merchant feed). Management talks about it as the priority growth bet.

United Kingdom

The UK cluster sells across ruminant, swine, and poultry and was for several years a profitability problem. ForFarmers ran a multi-year reorganisation - closing and consolidating mills to fix an over-capacity, low-return footprint. By 2025 management declared the reorganisation complete, with UK volume growth above 5% (driven by ruminants and supported by favourable milk prices) and the cluster's return on capital finally clearing the 10% threshold ForFarmers targets. The core capability is a national bulk-feed logistics network and ruminant nutrition expertise; the competitive challenge is a mature, consolidating UK feed market. Management now frames the UK as a turnaround that has been delivered, providing "a solid foundation for a healthy future outlook across all species."

Segment summary

Section 3: Products and Business Detail

The product catalogue is organised around the "Total Feed" concept rather than around branded SKUs, but the meaningful product families are:

• Compound feed - the core product, accounting for the bulk of margin. Pelleted or meal rations formulated by species and production stage (e.g. broiler starter/grower/finisher; dairy lactation rations; pig grower/finisher feed). Roughly 6.9% of group compound-feed volume growth came in 2025, with like-for-like compound growth a slim 0.7% - the headline volume growth is dominated by acquisitions and JV consolidation, not organic compound demand.
• Young-animal feed - specialist high-spec rations for piglets, calves, and chicks, where nutritional precision matters most and margins are higher.
• Specialty and mineral feeds - premixes, minerals, and additives that sit on top of the base ration.
• Liquid feeds and co-products - by-products from the human food, brewing, and bio-ethanol industries (the Van Triest competence), which lower ration cost and improve the sustainability profile.
• Raw materials, seeds and fertiliser - loose grains, grass and maize seed, and crop inputs sold to the same farmer base, deepening the relationship beyond feed.
• Advice and services - nutritional advice, farm-management support, and (in the integration model) the bird and the processing margin itself.

The technical hard part is least-cost formulation at scale. ForFarmers must continuously re-optimise hundreds of rations against volatile raw-material prices while hitting exact nutritional specs and regulatory limits on additives, medicated feed, and traceability. The "buying and selling" function - timing raw-material purchases (grain, soy) against feed selling prices - is itself a major profit driver; management repeatedly attributes margin gains to "a more effective buying and selling approach." Low raw-material prices through most of 2025 were a tailwind that lifted margins across all clusters.

Manufacturing is a network of roughly 40 mills across the four countries, close to livestock concentrations because bulk feed cannot travel far economically. Constraints are mill fill-rate (a half-empty mill is unprofitable, which is exactly why the Dutch herd reduction and the UK over-capacity hurt), feed-safety certification, and logistics. The integration milestone that is reshaping the business is the KPS poultry JV in Poland - the first time ForFarmers will own farms and slaughtering rather than only milling feed.

Geographically, the Netherlands is the founding market; the UK has been a major market since the Countrywide and BOCM PAULS-era acquisitions; Germany and Poland are the newer expansion. Poland is the only one of the four where the underlying feed market is growing.

Section 4: Customers

The customers are livestock farmers: dairy and beef producers, pig farmers, and poultry growers, plus a layer of agricultural merchants and integrators. In the Netherlands a meaningful share of customers are also members of the owning cooperative, which blurs the line between customer and shareholder and adds loyalty that a pure merchant supplier would not have.

The buying decision is made by the farmer (or the farm's nutrition manager on larger operations), and the criteria are animal performance per euro of feed, delivery reliability, and the quality of the nutritional advice. The sales cycle for an established customer is effectively continuous - feed is a repeat, high-frequency consumable, often on a standing order with deliveries every week or two. Winning a new customer is slower and relationship-led, usually requiring the adviser to demonstrate a measurable performance gain.

Why farmers choose ForFarmers: scale buys it the best raw-material prices (which it can pass through), the advisory relationship lowers the farmer's risk, and the breadth of the Total Feed range means one supplier covers feed, co-products, seeds, and advice. Switching costs are real but not absolute - feed is somewhat commoditised, so a farmer can change supplier, but doing so means giving up the embedded adviser relationship, the performance history on his herd, and any cooperative-membership benefits. The stickiness is behavioural and advisory rather than contractual lock-in.

Concentration is low and that is a feature, not a bug. ForFarmers sells to thousands of independent farms, so no single customer dominates revenue - which insulates it from any one customer leaving but also means it has limited pricing power over any individual farmer. The poultry-integration model in Poland changes this for that slice of the business: there the "customer" relationship is internalised because ForFarmers owns the chain.

Revenue predictability comes from the consumable, repeat nature of feed demand rather than from long contracts. Most business is recurring standing-order volume priced off raw-material costs, with the margin driven by the buying-and-selling spread. This makes volumes fairly stable but margins sensitive to grain/soy price swings and the timing of purchases.

Section 5: Competitive Landscape

European compound feed is a fragmented, regional, thin-margin industry. ForFarmers is the largest player by volume, but "largest" in this industry means a low-double-digit share of a market dominated by cooperatives and private giants, not a commanding moat. The structure is best understood as: a handful of large multi-country players, a long tail of regional cooperatives and family mills, and the global nutrition/additives majors who play more in premixes and additives than in bulk compound feed.

The real competitors differ by cluster. In the Netherlands and the wider Benelux/German region the closest peer is De Heus, a privately held Dutch family company of comparable feed volume that competes head-to-head on the same farms. In Germany the dominant force is Agravis Raiffeisen, a large farmer-cooperative. In Poland ForFarmers faces local feed producers and the integrators it is now trying to join. Across all markets the global names - Cargill (animal nutrition division), Nutreco (Trouw Nutrition / Skretting, owned by SHV Holdings), ADM, and Alltech - compete, though several of these lead in additives, premixes, and aquafeed more than in bulk farm compound feed.

ForFarmers wins on scale-driven raw-material buying, the density of its Dutch/UK logistics networks, and the advisory relationship. It loses, or is exposed, where the market is structurally shrinking (the Netherlands) and where it is sub-scale against entrenched local cooperatives. Barriers to entry are moderate: building a mill network and a raw-material buying desk takes capital and time, and feed-safety regulation is non-trivial, but feed itself is not patent-protected and margins are thin, so the barrier is more about logistics density and capital intensity than technology. The structural shift to watch is consolidation (ForFarmers itself is a serial acquirer) and the move toward vertical integration in poultry, which the KPS JV represents.

Honest read: this is not a wide-moat business. Margins are thin, the product is semi-commoditised, and the competition is intense and partly cooperative-owned (so not profit-maximising in the usual sense). ForFarmers' edge is scale, logistics density, and the advisory relationship - real but narrow.

Section 6: Industry

Demand for compound feed is driven by livestock numbers and the intensity of livestock farming. More animals, or more intensively fed animals, mean more feed. That demand is in turn shaped by meat and dairy consumption, animal-disease outbreaks (avian influenza, African swine fever), and - increasingly in Western Europe - government environmental policy that deliberately shrinks herds.

The European market is large and mature. FEFAC, the European feed federation, forecast total EU-27 compound-feed production of about 147.5 million tonnes in 2025, up a marginal 0.4% on 2024 - essentially flat. The composition matters more than the total: cattle feed roughly flat at about 41.6 million tonnes, pig feed declining about 0.5% to roughly 47.3 million tonnes, and poultry feed growing about 0.9% to roughly 50.4 million tonnes. The poultry shift is structural - poultry is the cheapest, most feed-efficient, and lowest-emission animal protein, so as consumers and policymakers push away from beef and pork, poultry gains. This is exactly why ForFarmers is tilting toward Polish poultry.

The regional picture inside Europe is sharply divergent. The Netherlands is contracting hard - pig feed forecast down roughly 10% as nitrogen policy and farm buy-out schemes reduce the national herd. Germany and France are also declining modestly. Poland is the growth pocket. ForFarmers sits in the middle of this supply chain: downstream of the global grain and soy traders (ADM, Cargill, Bunge) from whom it buys raw materials, and upstream of the farmers and, ultimately, the meat and dairy processors.

Regulation is a powerful, double-edged force. Feed-safety rules, traceability, medicated-feed restrictions, and additive approvals raise the cost of doing business (a barrier to small entrants) but also constrain demand when environmental policy targets the herd itself. The industry is moderately cyclical on margins (raw-material price swings) but fairly defensive on volumes - animals eat regardless of the economic cycle, which is what places ForFarmers in the Consumer Defensive bucket. The volume risk is not recession; it is policy and disease.

Tailwinds: the structural shift to poultry, low raw-material prices boosting margins (a 2025 phenomenon), and consolidation opportunities for a well-capitalised acquirer. Headwinds: Western-European herd reduction, avian influenza and swine disease, and the chronic thinness of feed-milling margins.

Section 7: Growth Triggers

All points below are drawn from the five most recent reporting periods. Reporting periods used: Q1 2026 trading update (May 7, 2026), FY2025 results (Feb 19, 2026), H1 2025 results (Aug 7, 2025), FY2024 results (Feb 20, 2025), H1 2024 results (Aug 2024).

• ForFarmers Polska / KPS poultry joint venture - the single biggest trigger. ForFarmers will take a 50.5% controlling stake in a vertically integrated Polish poultry business combining Tasomix feed with KPS farms and slaughtering, enterprise value ~PLN 2,192m (~€520m), targeted for completion in Q3 2026, approved by shareholders at the April 16, 2026 AGM. (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026; reconfirmed Q1 2026 update, May 7, 2026)

"By joining forces, we create a strong, integrated approach with the birds, with the feed, with the slaughtering activities." (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026)

• Poland capacity expansion and ruminant entry - beyond the KPS deal, management flagged acquiring FarmFarms to build a ruminant position in north-east Poland, extending the Polish footprint beyond poultry. (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026)
• Germany "team agrar" JV consolidation - the German joint venture, consolidated in 2025, drove a 38.7% rise in combined Germany-Poland volumes and continues to ramp; Q1 2026 volume growth of 9.3% was "mainly driven by the consolidation of the joint venture in Germany." (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026; Q1 2026 update, May 7, 2026)
• Netherlands market-share gains in a shrinking market - management states it is taking share across all species in the Netherlands, partially offsetting the policy-driven herd decline. (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026; H1 2025 results, Aug 7, 2025)
• UK reorganisation complete - capital now deployable for growth - the multi-year UK restructuring is finished, ROCE has cleared the 10% hurdle, and management frames the UK as a base for future investment across all species. (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026)
• Van Triest co-product integration largely complete - the 2024 acquisition strengthening the co-products/sustainable-ingredients capability is now substantially integrated, supporting Dutch margins. (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026; first announced H1 2024)
• ROIC/ROACE guidance to be revisited upward - having delivered ROACE of 17.4% against a 10% target, management said it would review its return guidance in autumn 2026 (repeated signal that the bar is being reset higher). (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026)

Section 8: Key Risks

• Dutch herd reduction is structural, not cyclical. This is the defining risk to the home market. Government nitrogen policy and farm buy-out schemes are deliberately and permanently shrinking the Dutch livestock herd - FEFAC sees Dutch pig feed down ~10% in 2025. The mechanism is direct: fewer animals means fewer tonnes of feed, lower mill fill-rates, and stranded capacity in ForFarmers' founding market. Management itself flags continued buy-out-scheme pressure on factory fill rates into 2026. This is a high-probability, moderate-to-significant drag that the entire international strategy is built to offset.

Management acknowledged the "Dutch buyout scheme impacts on factory fill rates" with "H1 2026 pressure expected" (FY2025 call, Feb 19, 2026). When the regulator is paying your customers to leave the business, the demand erosion is policy-driven and not something better salesmanship can fully reverse.

• Avian influenza and animal disease. Poultry is the growth bet, and poultry is the species most exposed to bird flu, which can force mass cullings and wipe out feed demand in a region overnight. ForFarmers already saw "bird flu challenges" dent Polish operations in 2025. With the KPS integration, ForFarmers will own birds and slaughtering directly, concentrating disease risk on its own balance sheet rather than spreading it across independent farmer-customers. Moderate probability, potentially sharp localised impact.

• Thin, volatile margins tied to the buying-and-selling spread. A large part of ForFarmers' profit comes from timing raw-material purchases against feed selling prices. 2025's record margins leaned on unusually low raw-material prices. If grain and soy prices rise and cannot be passed through fast enough, the margin tailwind reverses. The record 2025 result sets a high base that a normalised raw-material environment may not repeat - a real risk of difficult year-on-year comparisons.

• Integration and execution risk on the KPS JV. Moving from merchant feed-miller to owner of farms and slaughterhouses is a genuine change in business model, capital intensity, and risk profile (food processing carries operational, food-safety, and labour risks feed milling does not). At ~€520m enterprise value, this is a large bet for a company of ForFarmers' size; poor integration, Polish competition-authority conditions, or weaker-than-expected poultry economics would hurt. Management is also paying for control (50.5%) of a business co-owned by its existing Tasomix partners, which adds governance complexity.

• Acquisition-dependent growth masking weak organic demand. Headline 2025 volume growth was +18%, but like-for-like compound-feed growth was just +0.7%. The underlying European feed market is flat-to-shrinking, so almost all real growth is bought, not earned. If the acquisition pipeline dries up or deals are mis-priced, the underlying organic trajectory is barely positive. This is a structural feature of the industry, not a temporary blip.

• Concentrated anchor shareholder and cooperative governance. Coöperatie FromFarmers is both the largest shareholder and holds a priority share, and many customers are members. This usually aligns interests, but it can constrain decisions that benefit minority shareholders if they conflict with farmer-member interests (e.g. on pricing or capital return). A low-probability governance risk rather than an operational one.

Section 9: Walk the Talk

Concall/reporting periods used (most recent first): Q1 2026 trading update (May 7, 2026), FY2025 results (Feb 19, 2026), H1 2025 results (Aug 7, 2025), FY2024 results (Feb 20, 2025), H1 2024 results (Aug 2024). The most recent is within 90 days of the report date.

The story across these five periods is one of a management team that set a turnaround agenda and then delivered it, with the important caveat that a favourable raw-material environment did a lot of the heavy lifting in 2025.

Start at H1 2024 (Aug 2024). Management's agenda was clear: integrate the newly acquired Piast operation in Poland, complete the announced Van Triest co-product acquisition, and improve profitability after a weak 2023 (when ForFarmers had posted a reported net loss of €1.0m on one-off items, underlying net profit of just €22.7m, and had cut the dividend to €0.15). At that point the guidance was essentially "Piast integration on track, profitability improving, geographic spread building." Total volume excluding disposals/Piast rose a modest 2.0% and gross profit rose 5.4% - incremental, not dramatic.

By FY2024 (Feb 20, 2025) the profitability promise was visibly being kept. Gross profit rose 8.6% to €518.3m, volume rose 7.0% (3.5% like-for-like), ROACE improved to 13.0%, and the dividend was raised from €0.15 to €0.20 - a tangible follow-through on the "improving profitability" message. Management reaffirmed the 40-60% payout policy and pointed to the Van Triest integration and the Polish build-out as the forward agenda. This is the inflection point where the words started matching the numbers.

H1 2025 (Aug 7, 2025) continued the trajectory and, crucially, did not over-claim. Volume rose 21.3% (but only 2.4% like-for-like - management was transparent that acquisitions, not organic demand, drove the headline), gross profit rose 16.8% to €290.8m, underlying net profit jumped 46.3% to €23.4m, and ROACE on underlying EBIT climbed from 10.7% to 14.3%. Management was candid that the like-for-like compound number was thin (+0.5%), which is the kind of disclosure that builds credibility rather than papering over the organic-vs-acquired distinction.

FY2025 (Feb 19, 2026) was the payoff: a genuine record. Volume 10.6m tonnes (+18%), gross profit €611.2m (+17.9%), underlying EBITDA €145.9m (+44.7%), net profit €61.9m (+52.5%), EPS €0.70, ROACE 17.4% against a 10% target, and the dividend raised again to €0.30 (a second consecutive 50% increase). Two prior commitments were demonstrably delivered: the UK reorganisation, promised over several years, was declared complete with ROCE clearing 10%; and the Polish growth strategy was escalated into the KPS integration JV.

On the UK, the multi-year promise was a turnaround that finally landed: management reported the "reorganisation in the United Kingdom has been completed" with ROCE above the 10% threshold (FY2025, Feb 19, 2026). This had been an open commitment across several years of calls - it was kept.

Q1 2026 (May 7, 2026) showed continuity, not a victory lap. Volume +9.3%, gross profit +17.2% to €161.8m, underlying EBITDA +49.5% to €41.1m - momentum sustained, with management again attributing the volume to the German JV consolidation and being upfront that like-for-like turnover fell 4.7% on lower raw-material prices. The honesty about the like-for-like softness underneath strong headline numbers is consistent across all five periods.

Assessment: this is management that does what it says, and notably resists overstating it - they consistently separated acquired growth from organic growth and flagged the soft like-for-like underneath strong headlines. The one honest qualifier for the skeptic is that 2025's record leaned heavily on low raw-material prices, a tailwind management did not create and cannot control, so the credibility is in operational delivery and capital discipline rather than in calling the margin cycle.

Section 10: Shareholder Friendliness Index

Dividends. ForFarmers has grown its dividend steeply off a cut. After the difficult 2023 (dividend of €0.15 per share, following a reported net loss on one-off items), the company raised the dividend to €0.20 for 2024 and proposed €0.30 for 2025 - two consecutive 50% increases. The policy is a 40-60% payout of underlying net profit, with the exact level flexed for the strategic investment agenda, free cash flow, and debt. The €0.30 on EPS of €0.70 sits inside that band. The trend is clearly upward and tracks the underlying profit recovery rather than being financially engineered. (Source: FY2025 results, Feb 19, 2026; FY2024 results, Feb 20, 2025; FY2023 results.)

Buybacks and dilution. ForFarmers' buybacks are small and tied to employee/share-incentive schemes, not large capital-return programmes. Recent window (MoatMap, since 2026-03-17, ~90 days): three filings totalling 217,623 shares repurchased at roughly €6.28-€6.43, part of a 2026 programme authorised for up to 300,000 shares / €2.2m that was completed at 300,000 shares for €1,919,910 (programme ended ~June 5, 2026). Older window: the comparable 2025 programme, authorised at the April 17, 2025 AGM for up to 400,000 shares / €2.4m, was completed at 400,000 shares for €1,675,903. Both are explicitly described as buying shares to meet obligations under share-related incentive schemes - i.e. offsetting incentive dilution, not retiring meaningful share count. There is no evidence of a large open-market capital-return buyback over the last three years; the share count is broadly stable (around 88-89 million shares), neither materially shrinking nor ballooning. Capital return runs through the dividend, not the buyback. (Sources: ForFarmers buyback updates May 12 & 20, 2025 and May 20 / June 5, 2026; MoatMap buyback block.)

Verdict: Returns Capital (via dividend) - the dividend has been raised 50% two years running within a stated payout policy, while buybacks are immaterial and serve only to offset incentive-scheme dilution.

Section 11: Insider Activities

Venue: Euronext Amsterdam - insider/PDMR transactions are disclosed under EU MAR Article 19 and registered with the AFM (Autoriteit Financiële Markten). The MoatMap database (market: EU) is the spine for this venue and shows zero insider transactions in the trailing 12-month window (data current 2026-06-14). I cross-checked publicly available director-dealing records for the most recent period and found no new AFM PDMR notifications inside the strict last-12-month window (roughly June 2025 to June 2026) beyond the incentive-scheme buybacks already covered in Section 10.

What the record does show, just outside and around that window, is a consistent pattern of the CEO buying stock on the open market. Pieter Wolleswinkel (CEO) made repeated open-market purchases through 2024 and early 2025: roughly 25,000 shares at about €2.34 (around March 2024, increasing his direct holding by about 25%), roughly 17,000 shares at about €3.05 (around September 2024, about +13% to his holding), and 7,500 shares at about €4.15 (February 26, 2025). These are open-market buys, escalating in price as the turnaround took hold, and each materially increased his personal stake. (Source: publicly reported ForFarmers director dealings / AFM PDMR notifications; aggregated via Simply Wall St and Hargreaves Lansdown director-deals records.)

Reading the signal. The buys are the meaningful data point. They are genuine open-market purchases (not option exercises or grants), made by the chief executive, repeatedly, at rising prices, each adding a double-digit percentage to his personal holding - a textbook conviction pattern from the person with the most information about the turnaround. They predate the 50%-plus profit growth and the dividend doubling, so with hindsight they were well-timed. The qualifier is that they sit largely just before the strict trailing-12-month window, so within the exact window the insider ledger is quiet rather than actively bullish.

Net assessment. Inside the precise last-12-month window there are no material open-market insider buys or sells on record - the picture is neutral, with the only insider-attributed share activity being the small incentive-scheme buybacks. Looking slightly wider, the standout is the CEO's repeated open-market buying through 2024-early 2025, which was a clear conviction signal that has since been vindicated by results. There is no insider selling of note and no red flags. Overall read: neutral within the strict window, with a constructive recent history of CEO buying. Note that the AFM register is the authoritative primary source; if a very recent (last ~2 weeks) PDMR filing exists it may not yet be reflected here.

Section 12: Scenarios

Bull case. The KPS poultry integration completes cleanly in Q3 2026 and proves the thesis: owning the bird, the feed, and the slaughtering in one Polish chain captures margin that pure feed milling never could, and Poland becomes a genuine second home market growing where Western Europe shrinks. The German team agrar JV keeps ramping, the UK - reorganisation done - quietly compounds returns above its cost of capital, and the Dutch business defends share well enough that its decline is a slow bleed rather than a collapse. Raw-material prices stay benign, the buying-and-selling desk keeps margins healthy, and management resets its return target higher as promised. The dividend keeps climbing inside the payout policy. ForFarmers transitions in the minds of investors from "shrinking Dutch feed miller" to "diversified European feed group with a poultry-integration growth engine," and the heavy lifting of the geographic pivot is visibly paying off.

Base case. Management delivers roughly what it has guided. The KPS JV closes and integrates without disaster but with the normal friction of a model change, contributing steadily rather than spectacularly. Germany and Poland keep growing on consolidation and modest organic gains; the Netherlands keeps shrinking on herd reduction but ForFarmers keeps taking share so the cluster declines gently; the UK holds its improved returns. Headline volumes grow mostly through acquisitions and JV consolidation while organic compound-feed demand stays roughly flat - the structural reality of a mature European market. Margins normalise somewhat from the unusually strong 2025 as raw-material prices drift back to average, making year-on-year comparisons harder, but the dividend holds or edges up within policy. A solid, unexciting defensive compounder doing exactly what a feed company in a flat market can do.

Bear case. Several things go wrong at once. An avian-influenza wave hits Polish poultry just as ForFarmers has concentrated bird, feed, and slaughtering risk onto its own balance sheet through KPS, turning the growth engine into a loss centre. Raw-material prices rise and cannot be passed through fast enough, compressing the thin milling margin that record-2025 flattered. Dutch herd reduction accelerates beyond expectations as buy-out schemes bite, stranding mill capacity and dragging the home cluster down faster than international growth can offset. The KPS integration runs into competition-authority conditions, cultural friction, or weaker poultry economics than underwritten, and the €520m bet looks expensive. Underneath it all, the like-for-like organic story - barely positive even in the record year - is exposed as the true run-rate once the acquisition tailwind fades, and the market re-rates ForFarmers back to a low-growth, thin-margin commodity miller with a shrinking core.

Sources

• ForFarmers 2025 results (GlobeNewswire, Feb 19 2026)
• ForFarmers FY2025 earnings call transcript (Investing.com)
• ForFarmers FY2025 results presentation (PDF)
• ForFarmers H1 2025 results (GlobeNewswire, Aug 7 2025)
• ForFarmers 2024 results (GlobeNewswire, Feb 20 2025)
• ForFarmers H1 2024 results (Yahoo Finance)
• ForFarmers 2023 results (ForFarmers Group)
• ForFarmers Q1 2026 trading update (GlobeNewswire, May 7 2026)
• ForFarmers strengthens position in Polish market / KPS JV (GlobeNewswire, Feb 12 2026)
• ForFarmers share buy-back updates (GlobeNewswire, May 2025 & May/Jun 2026)
• FEFAC EU compound feed forecast 2025
• Top 10 European animal feed companies (Feed Strategy)
• ForFarmers cooperative history (Annual Report 2019)
• ForFarmers director deals (Simply Wall St)

(Section 13, Further Reading, is omitted: SemiAnalysis, Stratechery, and MBI Deep Dives - all tech/semiconductor/equity-compounder focused - have no coverage of ForFarmers.)

A note on the charts: the half-year net-profit figures are interim points within their full years (H1 2024 ~€16m, H1 2025 €23.4m) shown alongside full-year totals for trajectory, not as additive bars; the EU feed-mix "Other" is an approximation to reconcile the ~147.5m tonne total.