Jim Graham, a back-slapping farm boy who was North Carolina's agriculture commissioner so long he was called "the Sodfather," died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 82.

In his 36 years in office, Graham stomped grapes and drank the juice from his cowboy boot, kissed a donkey's rear to settle a bet, chomped on tobacco leaves for television cameras and brayed like a donkey at political gatherings to signal the war cry of the Democratic Party. He retired in January 2001.

"We have lost one of our most dedicated public servants, who will always be valued for his compassion and hard work," said Gov. Mike Easley. "The commissioner will forever be remembered and respected as a champion of agriculture with a burning desire to make life better for all people of North Carolina."

Graham's health had been failing for years, and after he retired, he was in and out of the hospital battling pneumonia and other ailments. He spent his last year at Mayview Convalescent Center in Raleigh, where visitors sometimes waited in line to see him.

Once an imposing figure who stood 6 feet 3 and weighed well more than 200 pounds, Graham was frail and thin and used a wheelchair by the time he died. But friends say he never lost the spark that made him legendary.

"When I walked in his room the other day, I said, 'What in the hell are you doing laying in here when there are sick people out there that need this space?' " said Jim Devine, Graham's longtime press secretary. "He said, 'You son of a ... You ain't never gonna change, and you ain't never going to heaven.' "

They spent the rest of the visit talking politics, a topic that always held Graham's interest.

In his prime, Graham was part folk hero, part savvy deal-maker. Governors came and went while he served longer than any other state agriculture chief in the country.

He built an empire even as the number of farms in the state declined from 188,000 in 1965 to fewer than 50,000 in 2000, his last year in office. When Graham took office, the Department of Agriculture had about 600 employees. By the time he left, he had more than 1,300 employees in 17 divisions and a $60 million annual budget.

Agriculture's champion

During his tenure, tobacco gave way to pork and poultry, and agriculture increasingly fell under the control of large companies, while family farms struggled.

Graham supported agribusiness and criticized environmental regulations, earning him the support of big businessmen such as Wendell Murphy, who made a fortune building a corporate hog industry in North Carolina.

"He was a friend of anybody in agriculture," Murphy said.

But small farmers all over the state, who saw Graham as an advocate for the little guy, were the driving force behind his victories in nine statewide elections, the first in 1964.

Graham got their votes by crisscrossing the state at a dizzying pace, attending countless meetings, shaking hands at country stores, following auctioneers up the aisles at tobacco warehouses. Each October, he moved his office to the state fairgrounds and worked the crowds at the State Fair, an event he relished.

Everywhere Graham went, wearing his trademark Stetson hat and size 15 1/2 alligator-skin boots, he treated acquaintances like old friends -- never forgetting a name or a face, always remembering to ask about a mama or daddy. If someone came to him with a problem, he never brushed it aside, his admirers say.

June Brotherton, Graham's spokeswoman from 1981 to 1989, remembers her boss carrying index cards in his pocket. He wrote down people's questions and concerns and, when he returned to the office, handed them to his employees. They had 48 hours to come up with an answer.

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