A hundred-year name.
A first-generation company.
Gustafson Engineered Solutions was founded in 2025 to carry the legacy Gustafson batch treating line forward — owned and operated by Sara and Josh Betcher in Mazeppa, Minnesota, with the patents, the tooling, and the team that built the equipment.
The name came home.
It started with a truck in Fargo. In 1926, Ben Gustafson incorporated the Automatic Seed Treating Equipment Company. The operation moved to the Minneapolis area around 1950, began producing its own treatment products in the 1960s, and by the 1980s Gustafson was the largest producer of seed treatment products in the world.
Then the name went quiet. After joint ventures through the ’80s and ’90s, Bayer AG took full ownership in 2005 — and in 2016 retired the Gustafson name, folding the products into its own portfolio.
In 2025, it came back. When Bayer divested its seed treatment equipment operations, the CBT patents and design rights, the specialty fabrication equipment, and the people who built the machines came home to Mazeppa — as Gustafson Engineered Solutions LLC.
Milestones
- 1926Founded in Fargo, North Dakota
- 1980sWorld’s largest producer of seed treatment products
- 2005–16The Bayer years — the Gustafson name is retired
- 2025Reborn in Mazeppa as Gustafson Engineered Solutions
Meet Sara & Josh Betcher.
Gustafson Engineered Solutions is family-run and owner-operated. The two people below sign the drawings, walk the shop floor, review every submission — and answer the phone.
Sara Betcher
Sara leads Gustafson Engineered Solutions as CEO and majority owner — making GES a woman-owned manufacturer from day one. She brings twenty years in the food and ag industry across quality management, safety management, finance, and administration.
At Gustafson she owns the disciplines that make a manufacturer dependable to do business with: finance, health & safety, and HR — from procurement and billing through payroll, accounting, and company policy. If an invoice, a safety program, or a commitment has the Gustafson name on it, it crossed her desk.
Josh Betcher
Josh runs operations, engineering, and manufacturing. He holds a BS in Ag Engineering from UW–River Falls, with twenty years in manufacturing and engineering — thirteen of them with Bayer Seed Treatment Equipment, working on the very machines Gustafson builds today.
He’s also a fifth-generation farmer: owner of JB Farms (est. 1883), 470 acres of row crops, forages, and conservation ground — 13 years of no-till and cover crops, 24 years of intensive nutrient management, and a 40-head beef operation. When the treater designer plants his own seed, the equipment gets honest fast.
Good neighbors build good equipment.
Our shop sits on 10 acres of Minnesota farmland, 70 miles southeast of MSP International — a 2014-built facility that doubles as a collaboration hub for customers, schools, and the community. We partner with the Shakopee High School Academy for science, tech, engineering & manufacturing, and with Goodhue High School’s technical education and agriculture programs — a pipeline for the next generation of builders.
- A safe working environment, always
- Environmental stewardship
- An employer of choice
- A business built to last
Put a century of batch treating to work.
Start a new application or get set up as a customer — it takes about ten minutes, and every submission goes straight to Sara and Josh.