“They are going, How come you are not feeding me right now?” Mr. Friday said. “And I have got some bulls around the corner that are patiently waiting for me to feed them, too.”

“I am a little bit behind, because my phone has been ringing off the hook.”

He agreed to talk after the cows were fed.

Later, Mr. Friday, who sometimes answers to “Ricky,” (which is what the older women in town call him) said that the rural life had inspired the 1,090 cartoons he had drawn in pen in the 21 years he had been illustrating his Farm News column.

As with the others, he had sketched the offending cartoon at his kitchen table. Then, as always, he scanned it, emailed it off to an editor and asked for confirmation that it had been received. It had been.

Usually, Mr. Friday said, he receives a reply with typical editor feedback. An apostrophe goes here or a word is spelled wrong there, he said. But the cartoon was published online, with little else said.

But on Saturday, an email from a news editor landed in his inbox. Mr. Friday, quoting the email, said that the cartoon “had caused a storm here” and that “in the eyes of some, big agriculture cannot be criticized or poked fun at.”

He was told his run with the Farm News, for which he said he had been paid “embarrassingly low” wages on a freelance basis, was over, per instructions from the publisher.