“We were anticipating thoroughbreds, and we got sold a donkey,” one farmer said.

Thomas Burrell, a soybean grower for more than 50 years, noticed something was off last August, two months before harvest: The soybean pods planted in about 2,000 acres in the northern Mississippi Delta were flat and not maturing.

But when he saw other soybean fields that used a more familiar seed variety, he said, they were vibrant and fuller.

He and his partners, all of them black farmers, had a hunch about the difference.

“This is not our first rodeo growing soybeans. We knew it was the seeds,” said Burrell, who is also the president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, a nonprofit advocacy group in Memphis, Tennessee.

Burrell is among a group of a few black farmers in Mississippi suing Iowa-based Stine Seed Co. for allegedly selling them “inferior” soybean seeds, which they claim is part of a wider conspiracy to take land from black farmers.