Three of the largest US beef packers — National Beef, Tyson Foods and Cargill — have asked the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to overturn the certification of a nationwide class of cattle producers seeking $9 billion in a price-fixing case. In July the US District Court for the District of Minnesota certified the producer class along with three damages classes of beef buyers ranging from large commercial purchasers to individual consumers.

The packers allege two fundamental errors. First, that the district court shifted the burden from the plaintiffs to the defendants: cattle producers, they argue, had to show that common evidence could prove injury across the whole class before any class was certified. "While defendants may be correct that the alleged episodic conduct had only episodic impact, defendants would have to present evidence to that end to undermine cattle plaintiffs' theory of harm to the fact finder at trial," their appeal says of the lower court's reasoning.

Second, they say the plaintiffs' expert analysed feedlot data rather than data from the cattle owners who make up the proposed class: "Plaintiffs instead ran their regression only on feedlots, many of which are not class members because they do not themselves produce (or own) fed cattle but rather sell on behalf of multiple fed cattle producers." Throughout the appeal the packers argue certification should have been denied outright because the plaintiffs failed to meet the legal requirements.

The litigation began in 2019 with a series of class actions and individual suits; the court consolidated the direct-purchaser cases in September 2021 and coordinated all the cases in October 2021, and further individual cases filed in 2022 were transferred to Minnesota by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.

At the heart of the producers' case is the price history: fed-cattle prices rose steadily from 2009 to 2014 on demand and a shortage of fed cattle after the 2011–2013 droughts, peaked in November 2014, and — contrary to the industry's expectation that they would stabilise around that level for several years — did not.

Source: DTN/Progressive Farmer