By AP/KWMU
St. Louis, MO – The St. Louis-based agribusiness company Monsanto announced Thursday morning it will buy the nation's third-biggest maker of cotton seed.
Monsanto will pay $300 million for Colorado-based Emergent Genetics.
Emergent's Stoneville and NextGen brands hold about 12% of the cotton seed market in the U.S.
The announcement comes less than a month after Monsanto said it was spending $1 billion in cash on Seminis, a California-based supplier of more than 3,500 seed varieties.
Also, late last year, Monsanto's newly formed holding company - American Seeds - acquired Indiana-based seed company Channel Bio Corp. for $120 million.
With competition continuing to erode Monsanto's dominance in herbicides, the maker of Roundup has increasingly focused on seeds.