Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
19 May 2026
No chapters available yet
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
Science, Innovation and Technology Committee House of Commons
00:05 - 01:18
Speaker 1
Order. Order. Good morning, and welcome to today's meeting of the science, innovation, and technology select committee. Now this is our third session session of our inquiry into innovation and global food security. What is the contribution that British science can make to food security here and globally?
Today, we're hearing directly from UK based agrotech SMEs. We'll explore the innovations that they are developing to support global food security, their experience in scaling, accessing investment, and navigating The UK startup and regulatory landscape, and how The UK ranks globally as a place to innovating agri tech. And we're very fortunate to have been joined for our first panel by excellent examples of UK innovation and startup. So I'm going to start kick off the proceedings by asking each of us each of you on the panel, and I will start from that next with Charles Vith, to briefly explain what your company does, the problem it is trying to solve, and how this will help address global food security. So mister Veth.
01:19 - 02:30
Speaker 2
Thank you very much. So I'm here representing for Tenex. We spun out of the University of Manchester in 2018, and we really focus on embedding intelligence, scouting intelligence within greenhouses. We build machines that run up and down greenhouses across UK, California, and parts of Europe, even Brazil recently. We focus on detecting problems within crops before they're visible, so significantly reducing the time to detect a problem and allowing growers to act with targeted resource with a dwindling labor and input budget and costs.
I think the big focus for us is is to be able to embed this capability within growers to enable trust in AI and technology, which is something that is something that has to be earned over time and something that's quite technically difficult within an area where there's a shortage of capital, expenditure and on the increasing energy prices where where the budgets for adopting such a technology may be currently allocated to to ensuring that they're covering the the unexpected costs we've seen over the last
The rest of the transcript is for Pro customers
Unlock the full transcript, chat, and every analysis feature with Polyfact Pro.
The video itself stays free to watch, in full, no account needed.
Ask anything about this video — I analyse its transcript to answer.