As Neighbors Live High on the Hog, Golf Course Builders Get Teed Off

STUART, Fla. — Paul Thompson’s place is a real pigsty. And noisy too.

Snorting 300-pound sows loll in the mud, dozens of smaller Yorkshire porkers oink at each other and gangs of squealing piglets race around the barnyard. Not to mention honking geese, clucking chickens and a persistent buzz from clouds of flies that are as thick as the heat.

At times, in fact, there is so much ambient animal sound rising up from Thompson’s farm that a visitor almost forgets about the country music blaring from speakers mounted on the barn.

Oh, and the smell? Bad.

“Yeah,” said Thompson, “this is my bit of paradise. But you’d have to wonder why somebody would build a golf course right next door.”

Five years ago, that’s exactly what a group of high-rolling investors did. The Florida Club is a planned community of 300 homes built around an 18-hole golf course carved from fields of oak, palmetto palm and pastureland about 40 miles north of West Palm Beach. And as Thompson claims--with more than a little irony--”It’s the only golf course in the world built next door to a pig farm.”

Now, the 62-year-old Thompson says, the developers are trying to drive him off the 3-acre plot on which he has lived and raised pigs for 44 years. The Florida Club sued Thompson and a pig-owning neighbor, Thomas Rossano, charging that the smell and the music that the farmers play to keep the animals content is a nuisance.

“This is Old Florida vs. New Florida,” said attorney Lance Richard, who represents Thompson and Rossano. “When you see urban sprawl from Miami pushing north, there’ll be more cases like this.

“These are corporate bullies pushing little guys around.”

During Rossano’s trial last week, Robert Kramer, one of the Florida Club owners, denied from the witness stand that he was trying to bully anyone. But, he testified, home sales were down. And one reason could be that the farmer’s music was “extremely loud and annoying.”

Driven 10 miles west of the Martin County courthouse, the jurors toured Rossano’s farm and the golf course. They sniffed the air and listened to the music. Back in the courtroom, they heard from agriculture experts, technicians who measure decibel levels and a Florida Club golf shop manager who sells a cap embroidered with the club’s logo and a “no pigs” emblem.

They also heard emotional testimony from both Rossano and his wife, Faith Ann, who had jurors wiping their eyes with her tearful account of how she came to love country life while watching her daughter raise a pig to enter in competition at the county fair.

After a brief deliberation, the jurors on Friday found that the odor was not a nuisance, but that on occasion Rossano had violated the county’s noise ordinance.

Judge Ben Bryan, who had previously ordered the pigs removed from Rossano’s property, is to rule on the Florida Club suit this week. He is not bound by the jury’s findings.

But the trial of Rossano, a mail carrier who raises only a few porkers, is considered a preview of a more heated battle over Thompson’s commercial operation. By fall, when his trial is scheduled to begin, Thompson will have up to 400 hogs wallowing in his rural heaven.

Thompson and his wife, Connie, married in high school and moved to the country in 1957 “because we wanted to be left alone,” he said. Along with pigs, the couple raised their four children here.

A onetime deputy sheriff, Thompson said he wants to keep the peace. The music he plays is designed to soothe the swine, not rile the neighbors.

“We did turn the music down, and we moved the speakers to the middle of the property,” said the husky farmer, leaning back against a pickup truck loaded with stinky pig fodder--days-old bread, grocery and restaurant leftovers and used brewery grain.

“But these rich developers are trying to tell me how to live. And I am not about to do any more compromising.

“There is a lesson here,” he added, “and it’s simple: If you build a golf course next to a pig farm, there is going to be a problem.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.