July Billing – July 16th
Iowa State University is transitioning to a new accounting system as of July 18th. To help with this transition, the Seed Lab will be completing our billing for July on the 16th. This is one week earlier than we normally conduct billing. Any tests not completed before noon on July 16th will be billed in August. In the future, billing will again take place around the 22nd to 24th of every month. Please note that you will see some changes regarding account numbers and statement information in the next month. Along with this accounting change will come the ability to pay by credit card. This should be available by the September billing cycle.
Now Offering Canada Grading
If you are shipping seeds to Canada and need a grade assigned to the lot, Iowa State now offers that service! The USDA has established a special training course and certification to allow labs in the US to assign Canada grades to Seed Lots going to Canada. This expedites the import process because the grade will not have to be assigned after the seed enters the country. Call or email to find out more about how we can meet your Canadian Testing needs.
Cover Crop – Prechill and Freshly Harvested Seed
It is that time of year again when we start to receive cover crop samples at the lab. It is important that you remember to include the month and year harvested on your samples when sending them in.
Below is a friendly reminder about Harvest dates!
Why might we ask when a sample was harvested?
Certain crops need a pre-chill period before the growth period to break the naturally occurring dormancy in some recently harvested crops. Common examples include oats, rye, other cereals, and grasses. Applying a prechill to a sample means placing the planted seeds in a cold chamber (5 or 10C) for five, seven or more days prior to placing the tests in the appropriate warm temperature. Time is money, and adding unnecessary prechills and having to retest samples that should have had a prechill, means adding to the days until a report of analysis can be issued. To that end it is important that Seed Lab staff know if incoming samples were “recently harvested”, and the best way to do that is to supply the month and year of harvest.
If you have one of our sample bags, this also serves as a submission form (See example), and even has a quick guide for the tests you will likely need for cover crop testing. Please fill out the sample submission form as completely as possible for the quickest possible processing time!
If you do not have cover crop sample bags, we will send 10 bags out to you at no charge. Please reach out by email at seedlab@iastate.edu. We will get them to you as quickly as we can.
Seed Numbers for Seed Health Testing – Policy Change September 1
Our Customer Care staff has noticed an increase in requests from our Seed Health customers to list the number of seeds tested on the final reports. We are happy to accommodate this request, however, many times we do not receive enough seed to do all of the testing as requested. This happens, for example, if a customer requests 3000 seeds for a PCR test and 1000 seeds for an ELISA test. We would need 4000 seeds total because different test methods cannot use the same seed.
Currently, we try to contact customers when there is insufficient seed to test the amounts requested. This does take extra time and resources. As of September 1, we will no longer contact customers for additional seed if we do not receive enough seed at the start. We will divide the seed and complete the various tests but will NOT be able to list specific seed numbers on the final report if we did not start with enough seed.
If you need to have that information listed, you will need to send a new sample with the correct number of seeds. There may be additional charges for extra testing.
