The brisk spring breeze whipped the notes away and spread them.
After 20 minutes of hunting he found all but $20 and, his Scottish blood finally losing patience, he gave up looking and climbed back on the tractor, only to find the elusive note down beside his seat.
The other day, hurrying again, he found a piece of twine hooked messily around a fencepost at a grazing block. He unravelled it and put it in his ute, then drove off.
Approaching the main road intersection, he tried to shift his foot toward the brake to slow down, but found he couldn't move it.
Looking down, he realised the twine was both tangled around his foot and shut in the ute door, effectively trapping him and holding his foot back from the brake.
Luckily he'd begun to slow some distance from the end of the road so had time to reach down and free his foot.
I heard of another farmer having a similar problem with not being able to stop a vehicle - only this time the driver was a dog.
I'm not sure if there were any passengers sitting in the side-by-side ATV at the time, but the farm dog leaned on the accelerator and drove off down the race, only stopping when he ran into a fence. Luckily nobody was hurt.
Which could also be said of one of our newborn calves, which had a heart-stopping traffic moment.
The calving mob was in the last break in their paddock, a small triangular piece between the main road and the driveway.
Bruce, heading down the driveway, spotted a small calf standing alertly in the middle of the drive.
The calf also spotted him and perceiving a threat, flew across the cattlestop and hightailed into the middle of State Highway 1.
Fortunately, the road was clear.
Bruce and the calf eyeballed each other, Bruce wondering how best to retrieve it, the calf pondering its next move.
It decided it didn't fancy the open road and ran back the way it had come.
Another calf caused some concern when it refused point blank to drink from the calfetaria. Trial and error revealed it could be persuaded to drink if someone stood next to it so it could lean on them.
Unfortunately, with hundreds of calves to rear and limited time, this personal service wasn't always available and the large red and white Hereford bull calf was, in Plunket's words, failing to thrive.
Bruce wondered if it would take to a nurse cow, and found one.
It proved the silver bullet - the calf latched on to its adoptive mother right away and has grown so rapidly it's now almost the same size as her.
We've reared so many calves this year, there are mobs scattered across the farm and feeding them takes a while.
Rushing between mobs, Rachel hit the gate post with the calfetaria and overturned it, to the calves' puzzlement.
And she's occasionally got it stuck in a muddy patch, usually needing help to get it out. Although the last time she called Terry to tow her out of the mud, he merely switched the ATV to four wheel drive and drove it straight out.
That can trap even more experienced players though. Bruce's father was towing a trailer with the ATV when he got stuck in the mud.
Bruce watched his father trudge off to the shed to fetch the tractor to tow himself out. But before he came back, Bruce checked the bike to see if it was in four wheel drive.
It wasn't, so he hopped aboard and drove towards the tractor shed, grinning at Barrie as he appeared around the corner on the tractor.
