“I’m blessed I’m mechanical enough, I get a lot of work from other tractor pullers. I’ve actually designed a few pieces and parts and made them which have helped the whole tractor pull industry.” One of his tractors even migrated across the Atlantic. “I built a tractor in 1992 and we took it to the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, Ken. But we didn’t even get to bring it home. I sold it there to Peter Clark and it went to England. That summer, he blew the motor out of it. So I went over there for two weeks and re-built it for him. Then I had a chance to pull it in England and in Amsterdam, Holland.” The original shop his dad built in 1959 is still in use. “There has been Grand National Super Stock sitting right there. We’ve got turning lathes, drilling machines, a shaper. We can make gears and internal spines; we
build couplers; we make our own transmissions and power axles. There isn’t much in the pulling world that has to leave the shop, unless it needs heat-treating or needs something super special. We do it all right here – it just takes a lot of time,” Mark said. He gave credit to two part-timers who work with him. Jake Law is a machinist who works at Handel Repair. And Bobby Wagner does truck equipment repair for Mettler Fertilizer. Mark and Cindy’s son, Tyler, also helps out when he’s not working as a CNC machinist at PMC LLC in Emery. “They make me look good,” Mark said. Menno farmer Chris Fergen is also an essential cog in the machine, spraying the crops and providing other essential labor at the Ulmer farm in exchange for the use of Mark’s machinery.
Cindy usually only travels to tractor pull events which aren’t too far away. “A lot of wives say to me they’d never let their husbands be gone like that all the time. But I knew when I married him 43 years ago – all the Ulmers are pullers.” When their daughter, Jessica, was little, she wasn’t as accepting of Dad leaving for the next tractor pull. “She’d get mad and not talk to him for two or three days,” Cindy said. Jessica and her husband, Andrew Bruzek, have three daughters, Jemma, 9, Jayda, 7, and Jersey, 5. Tyler and his wife, Heidi, have two sons, Aiden, 10, and Henry, 3. Cindy grew up north of Olivet on the farm of her parents, Edgar and Elda Schaeffer. About 20 years ago, Cindy started a greenhouse operation on the farm. Then they bought a greenhouse in Menno and attached a flower shop to it. She
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