For Decades, They Rebuilt Feed Trucks. Then They Decided to Rethink Them Entirely.
- Jun 19
- 4 min read
In many commercial feedyards, the people driving the most important equipment on the operation are often some of the newest employees on site.
Every day, those drivers are responsible for delivering precise rations on tight schedules using equipment pushed through one of agriculture’s harshest operating environments. Feed has to arrive at the right time, in the right amount, every single day. When something goes wrong, whether it is a breakdown, a delayed feeding cycle, or inconsistent feed delivery, the effects move quickly across the entire yard.
Feedyards do not tolerate inconsistency well.
For decades, Aulick Industries watched those pressures build in real time.
The Nebraska-based company has spent generations building, rebuilding, and servicing feed trucks for cattle operations across the Great Plains. Over the years, the same issues kept resurfacing. Trucks broke down under extreme workloads. Experienced drivers became harder to retain. Equipment costs continued climbing while operational margins tightened.
At first, the solution was straightforward. Build a better truck.
“We were seeing trucks pushed beyond what they were really designed for,” says Jacob Hansen, CEO and co-founder of ALA Engineering. “Feedlots were taking over-the-road trucks and trying to adapt them into something they were never truly built to be.”
Building a Better Feed Truck
Aulick Industries responded the way it always had, through engineering.
The company strengthened frames, upgraded suspensions, and continuously refined trucks specifically for cattle feeding operations. Long before autonomy became a mainstream conversation, the team was already experimenting with electric feed trucks and auto-steer systems, searching for ways to improve durability, consistency, and efficiency inside the yard.
But the pressure inside feedyards kept growing.
Labor became harder to find and harder to retain. Experienced feed truck drivers were increasingly difficult to replace. Trucks were operating under nonstop strain with little room for downtime.
“There’s so much precision involved in feeding cattle at scale,” Hansen says. “Timing matters. Consistency matters. Feed accuracy matters. And a lot of times, it’s some of the least experienced people on the site that are driving some of the most expensive and most important equipment in the yard.”
Eventually, the team realized the challenge was larger than improving individual components or repairing the same recurring failures. The system surrounding cattle feeding operations was becoming harder to sustain through incremental fixes alone.
That realization led to the creation of ALA Engineering.
The company officially spun out from Aulick Industries to focus entirely on autonomy and advanced feedyard technology, though the relationship between the two organizations remains deeply connected. Hansen’s co-founders, Austin and Vinc Aulick, brought decades of firsthand manufacturing and feedyard experience into the new company, while Aulick Industries continued serving as a major manufacturing partner.
Rather than separating from the cattle industry, ALA was built directly from it.
From Repair Shop to Autonomy
Hansen did not originally expect his career to land in agriculture. Growing up in western Nebraska and later studying software engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, he initially imagined working on robo-taxis or highway freight autonomy in larger tech markets.
Then he met the Aulick team.
“They already had customers asking for this,” Hansen says. “There was already this feeling inside feedyards that the industry was reaching a point where something had to change.”
By the time Hansen joined the effort in 2018, Aulick Industries had already built an early truck platform specifically designed to support future automation. That gave the team something most startups never have: a working platform ready for testing.
The early days looked exactly like what they were: a small team trying to solve difficult problems with limited resources.
“It was just a person with a laptop plugged into a truck trying to figure things out,” Hansen says.
Before the technology ever entered a feedyard, the team spent months testing in parking lots, driving feed trucks in circles while slowly building a working proof of concept.
It was scrappy. It was expensive. And every decision carried weight.
“We couldn’t afford to guess wrong,” Hansen says. “Every decision felt like the product was on the line.”
They did not start by trying to build a fully driverless truck.
First came driver information systems. Then advanced driver assistance systems that automated specific functions like ground speed and feed box controls. Eventually, steering automation followed.
In 2022, ALA achieved its first fully autonomous feeding demonstration.
The early test was far from perfect, but for the first time, the truck successfully navigated a feedyard and completed a feeding cycle without human input.
“It proved the concept was there,” Hansen says.
That larger realization eventually led to the creation of AGEO Autonomy, the parent company focused on bringing autonomous vehicle technology into industries beyond cattle feeding, including construction, mining, and other off-highway applications.
Still, cattle feeding remains the proving ground.
Building the Technology Where It’s Used
“We want to build the tech where the tech’s used,” Hansen says. “We don’t want to build solutions as outsiders. We want to be where the work is actually happening.”
That philosophy is also part of why Nebraska matters to the company’s future.
The team is building technology in the same region where large-scale cattle feeding operations already operate every day. Being close to producers, operators, and manufacturing partners allows the company to test ideas faster, gather direct feedback, and build systems that fit naturally into existing operations.
That connection also helped lead the company to The Combine, powered by Invest Nebraska.
As ALA Engineering continued growing, The Combine helped connect the team with mentors, industry leaders, and agricultural networks across the state. Hansen says the organization became an important resource as the company continued scaling inside Nebraska’s agricultural ecosystem.
Today, the company is preparing to deploy its first customer unit while continuing to expand its broader technology platform for feedyards.
At the same time, Aulick Industries remains deeply involved in manufacturing future units, continuing the relationship that helped create the company in the first place.
For Hansen, that connection matters because this was never a technology company searching for an agricultural problem to solve. It was built by people who had spent years inside feedyards watching operational pressure intensify firsthand.
After years of testing in parking lots, rebuilding prototypes piece by piece, and refining systems in real-world conditions, the next step for ALA Engineering is surprisingly simple.
Hand the trucks to paying customers. Feed cattle. And prove it can handle the same realities producers face every single day.
Learn more at ala.engineering
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