The busy season for the Iowa State Seed Lab is coming up very fast! Right around the corner we will start receiving samples in our labs by the hundreds daily. We wanted to take a moment to introduce you to the Seed Lab Customer Relations Team and update you on some changes that took effect on August 1.

Seed Lab Business

Customer Care spends a good portion of our day unboxing and organizing samples that arrive from our customers. During the busy season, our counters are full of boxes waiting to be processed! Often, we are missing items that will slow this process down. For the benefit of all our customers, the more information included with the samples the quicker and smoother this process goes.

Please be sure to include the following in all your packages:

• Completed Submission Form – Including Account # and Customer information
• Type or print legibly to reduce processing errors
• Sample bags/envelopes should be labeled to match the submission forms

The more information you can give Customer Care the faster we can process through all the samples that arrive daily!

Why might you get a call from Customer Care asking when a sample was harvested? Are you aware that AOSA Rules For Testing Seeds requires that certain types of freshly harvested seed (approximately within 6 months) need a pre-chill before we can start testing? Examples include oats, rye, & other cereals, grasses.

What is a pre-chill? A cold, moist treatment applied to seeds to overcome dormancy prior to the germination test. The prechill method varies among species but is usually performed by holding imbibed (placed on moist planting media) seeds at a low temperature for a specified period.

Mike Stahr, Seed Lab Manager addressed this in his May 2023 Manager’s Corner on our Seed Lab website: “Adding a prechill means placing the planted seeds (on towels, blotters, sand, etc.) in a prechill chamber at 5C or 10C for five, seven or more days and then placing the tests in the correct warm temperature. In today’s world where time is money, an unnecessary prechill means adding to the days until a report of analysis is created. To that end it is important that Seed Lab staff know if incoming samples contain seeds that are “recently harvested” (Volume 1 Section 6.9e). Often there is confusion on what qualifies as recently harvested. The best bet may be for those sending seed samples to supply the month and year of harvest.  If the month isn’t available, then knowing the year of harvest may be helpful.”

Please include this information on your samples or sample submission form in the future for quicker processing!

We have been working through the process of becoming paperless. By moving to electronic communication (email) correspondence, we are reducing the amount of paper our office consumes, and more importantly we give our customers a much faster turnaround on test result reports as they can be emailed on most occasions the same day the test results are complete.

Here are three ways we email information to customers now:

• 1 – Email Subject: ISU Seed Lab Customer Summary
  • Germination and other non-health testing customers will receive this email when samples have been planted by the lab. Also, this email will advise if you may have a sample up for a re-test.
• 2 – Email Subject: Iowa State University Seed Lab Reports
  • Contains either PDF versions of test result reports or a notification that test results are available on the WebLocker site.
• 3 – Email Subject: Iowa State University Seed Lab Invoice (MONTH) (YEAR)-Health
  Email Subject: Iowa State University Seed Lab Invoice (MONTH) (YEAR)-Non-Health
  • Contains your monthly invoice from the Seed Lab. Note that if your company does both Non-Health and Health testing, you will receive separate invoice emails as listed above.

IMPORTANT: Please make sure your account contacts are up to date so that the correct people are receiving the Customer Summary, Report Results, and Invoices.