The seventh president of the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation, Don Waller, greets visitors at the door of his Lafayette County home, dressed sharply. Waller harvested his last crop in 2014 at the age of 83. Today, at 92, he still operates the Waller Funeral Home in Oxford. But don’t let the coat and tie fool you, Waller is all farmer.

“I’ve never given it a thought that I wouldn’t farm all my life,” Waller said. “My grandparents lived in a house that sat right here. They moved here in 1904.When they went out of the dairy business, it made it even more so that I would farm. We had row crops, beef cattle, dairy cattle, cotton and corn.”

Waller became a part of the Farm Bureau family thanks to his father, eventually rising to the position of Lafayette County president.

“My daddy and Mr. Ransom Aldrich were very good friends,” he said. “I knew who he was and knew him when I saw him, but other than that, I was so young, ‘till it didn’t really register much to me what kind of position he held. He lived right up the road, near Michigan City.”

Waller would lead his county as president for 20 years. Political service was always in his family’s DNA. His brother, William Waller, ran for governor in 1967, eventually being elected during his second attempt to run for the office in 1972.

Waller would serve Farm Bureau as North Mississippi Vice President for six years, before deciding to run for president against Hugh Arant, Sr. in 1988. Two ballots needed to be cast to determine a winner.

“It was an anxious time,” Waller said. “The he funny thing about it is after the first vote determined the tie, the delegates went back to their districts, pondered things over again, and then came back in.”

After the counting was finished the second time, Waller won the election by one vote. During his eight years as president, Waller worked to get MFBF on firm ground financially, raising dues twice.

“I called a special session of the delegates to raise membership dues, and of course that was quite controversial,” he said. “A lot of the people said, ‘Oh, we’re going to lose membership, and we just going to go backwards. We better not do anything.’ But good sense prevailed, and we passed a dues increase.”

In the early-1990s, Waller also had the forethought to prepare members and the state for boll weevil eradication. After watching the destruction of cotton crops in Georgia and Alabama, Waller and MFBF led efforts to pass the Boll Weevil Eradication Act through the Mississippi Legislature in 1993.

“One year, boll worms really knocked out the crop. Word went around that it was because of the Boll Weevil Eradication Program. We fought that battle for a while. That was some kind of battle. But, after a while, common sense prevailed, and we got back on track. And, we finally got a very successful program.”

Today, as he thinks back to his years as president, Waller counts himself blessed because of the vice presidents, board members and MFBF staff who worked at his side, continuing to push Farm Bureau to the forefront as the voice of agriculture.

“I think we had some good employees during my administration. I had really good vice presidents. They were like-minded, so that helped a whole lot. We were successful in a lot of our policy issues. So much so, that we got to be pretty powerful at a national level.”