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When he paused to talk, he revealed he was leaning against a fence, and the heifers were staring at him, hard.
“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.
Farm News is read in print and online by 24,000 households in 33 Iowa counties, according to its website. On Wednesday, a woman who answered the phone at the company said, “No comment” when asked about the end of the publication’s relationship with Mr. Friday. Calls to Farm News’s publisher, The Messenger in Fort Dodge, Iowa, were not returned.
Mr. Friday said he had never intended to make fun of anyone. He said that as an editorial cartoonist, he was illustrating news. The plight of farmers was evident last year, when commodity prices took a dive, he said.
“We are kind of dictated what our wages are going to be somewhat on the stock exchange,” he said.
Asked why he had singled out Monsanto, DuPont and John Deere, Mr. Friday said he wanted to illustrate the differences between what a year in agriculture can look like for individual farmers and big agribusiness. He said he drew his inspiration and research from a report in The Des Moines Register and from whatever he could find on the Internet about the salaries of the chief executives of those companies.
“In agriculture, you need chemicals, herbicides, seed companies and equipment,” he said. “I just used reputation. It was not trying to pick on anybody in this industry; it is just common knowledge.
“The point of my cartoon, and I hoped that it would be self-explanatory, is that one farmer said he wishes there was more profit — and who wouldn’t?” he added.
“But someone complained about it, and this is the philosophy I use when I explained it to my children: They were being fed by two hands,” Mr. Friday said, referring to Farm News and its relationships with him and with its advertisers.
“They knew they had to chose one, and they chose the hand that they knew would hurt the least,” he said. “After 21 years, that is what really bothered me.”
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