The largest cotton seed company in the world is Bayer.
The second largest? A seemingly tiny Hyderabad-based agri-biotech company that recently bought the Indian cotton businesses of two agricultural giants — Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer.
Today, Tierra Agrotech Private Limited owns Asia’s largest collection of cotton germplasm.
That’s decades of research. Hundreds of crores of investment. Seven truckloads of seed that arrived in air-conditioned tractor trailers at Tierra’s headquarters in the village of Dabilpur, on the outskirts of Hyderabad, earlier this year. This instantly vaulted the company into India’s top 10 list.