Good Afternoon Iowa State Seed Lab Customers!

 

Seed Lab Business

 

New Service Charges effective 9/1/23

Customer Care is rolling out new Service Charge fees for the many extras we do for our customers. We value each and every one of our customers and want to do what we can to help when errors occur on our end or the customers end. Our office staff handle so many things behind the scenes that customers may not be aware of.

Many of these items are out of our control for example:

  • A signed and wet stamp certificate needed
  • Customer requesting changes to samples (adding tests/removing tests) that have already been processed by our staff
  • Requests to add verbiage to reports after results have been received
  • Research into old samples for a customer
  • Various other tasks

We have found that, due to the time spent on many of these “extra” tasks, we must start charging a small service fee to our customers. Note that we will not charge a service fee without advising the customer first. The service charge will show on the sample that the “extra” task was performed on and a description of the service charge will be listed. Most service charges will be between $5.00 and $25.00 depending on the task. If project work may be needed, we will discuss the cost first prior to starting the project.

We understand that although we try to enter everything correctly sometimes the report mistakes are on our end and we will gladly fix those at no cost to our customers.

 

Coming to your Mailbox Soon — Customer Survey

Your feedback could win you one of two $25 Amazon gift cards or one $50 Amazon card!

It is that time of year when we check in with our customers to see how we are doing! Any day now you should see a customer survey from the Seed Lab pop up in your email. Please take a moment to fill out the survey and tell us about our service over the past year. We want to hear what you like, don’t like and what suggestions you might have for any improvements we could make.

Thank you for taking the time to respond!

 

Testing Seeds to send to New Zealand

 

For many crops, New Zealand has specific seed quantity requirements. Please be sure to note on you submission form that you intend to export to New Zealand so that we can confirm the correct quantity of seeds needed.

Cucumber Fruit Mottle Mosaic Virus (CFMMV)

Due to changes in Brazil testing requirements for cucurbits, we have received several questions on testing for Cucumber Fruit Mottle Mosaic Virus (CFMMV). CFMMV is a tobamovirus, but it is not well-characterized. There is no ELISA, no established PCR assay, and no infected seed to be found. At this time, we believe the best option is to run a conventional PCR test using tobamovirus-specific primers F-5476/R-6287 (Levitzky et al. 2019) and follow-up with DNA sequencing if needed.