This isn't exactly the retirement that Paul and Mildred Thompson dreamed about. After a career with the space program in Huntsville, Ala., and some part-time farming in southern Tennessee, Paul Thompson bought a 170-acre farm in remote Bedford County that had been in his wife Mildred's family for nearly a century.

The only problem is that the air isn't as fresh and the ground isn't as clean as the Thompsons had hoped. A few years after they moved to the property, a man named Steve Darnell built a hog farm next door. With 600 pigs on less than 10 acres, the farm emanates a nauseating odor, making it difficult to breathe the air from the Thompsons' front porch. And, the Thompsons say, the pigs also have ruined three of the Thompsons' wells, polluted the soil on much of their property and reduced their property values.

"Those pigs produce tons of manure, and every time it rains the manure runs down onto our pastures and into our wells," says Thompson, who was, at one time, on the board of directors for the Bedford County Farm Bureau. "It's gotten on my nerves so bad, and I don't know what to do."

The Thompsons sued, seeking $923,327 in damages. The case was heard in a Bedford County courtroom last month. In the hearing, Darnell's attorney rebutted many of the Thompsons' claims, maintaining that the couple can't prove the pig farm is ruining their water supply. "I farm the way my daddy taught me," Darnell said on the witness stand, according to the Shelbyville Times-Gazette. A Bedford County judge is expected to rule on the case any day now.

The case of the Bedford County pig farm may sound like a local matter, but it and other cases like it have aroused the state legislature—and not in favor of people like the Thompsons. The state Senate recently and unanimously passed a measure known as the "Right to Farm" bill, intended to make even stronger an existing Right to Farm law that the Tennessee Farm Bureau insists needs updating.

Under the new legislation, it would be even more difficult to successfully sue a farmer for being a nuisance. The bill would give a farmer a "rebuttable presumption" that his farm is not a nuisance. The only way a neighbor could prove otherwise is to present expert testimony that the farm doesn't conform to "generally accepted agricultural practices," which, not insignificantly, aren't written or outlined anywhere.

"The problem with just setting up a vague standard of 'generally accepted agricultural practices' is that no one knows what those are, which makes it very hard to prove that someone is violating them," says John Blakenship of Murfreesboro, the Thompsons' attorney. "After all, what if all the generally accepted agricultural practices in a certain area are bad? Under this law, it won't matter, as long as everyone does it the same way."

In previous years, it was unclear whether Tennessee's Right to Farm law applied to farms that had changed dramatically, such as a farm that expanded or shifted from one product to another. The bill the Senate passed tries to address that situation by saying that a farm must be "materially different in character and nature" than it had previously been for the farmer not to be protected by the new law. In other words, if a farmer greatly expands the number of chickens or pigs on his property, the state Right to Farm law probably would give him a certain level of immunity from any nuisance lawsuit that his neighbors might file.

The Farm Bureau wrote the legislation and has lobbied for it, saying that its purpose is to protect farmers from the long-term effects of urban sprawl. State legislators have been quick to jump on the Farm Bureau's bandwagon. "The farmers of Tennessee shouldn't have to bear the burden of paying to defend against nuisance suits brought by city folk unfamiliar with farming practices, who think they want to live in the country but for some reason seem to think they have to bring city life along with them," says Sen. Tommy Haun, a Greeneville Republican and sponsor of the bill.

The passage of the Right to Farm bill is almost a foregone conclusion, since no one appears to be lobbying against it. (The Tennessee Environmental Council, though, has added a small amendment that it believes will keep the law from being used to help farmers violate pollution control regulations.) The bill's success is only the latest reminder that farmers are still powerful in the Volunteer State. The legislature usually approves such farmer-friendly bills, and many new regulations the legislature has passed over the years exempt farmers from various state mandates. A few years ago, the legislature even passed a bill known as the "Southern Dairy Compact" to include Tennessee in a regional organization that could raise the price of a gallon of milk by over $1.50 to help dairy farmers. (Congress hasn't authorized the Southern Dairy Compact yet, which is why it hasn't become a reality.)

The most significant impact of Tennessee's powerful Farm Bureau is in the area of taxation. In Tennessee, almost everything a farmer buys related to farming (feed, equipment, pesticides) is exempt from sales taxes. While the legislature has considered many drastic options to solve the state's budget crisis, the Farm Bureau has successfully lobbied to keep these sales tax exemptions in place. As for a statewide property tax, which some legislators have suggested, the Farm Bureau has kept that alternative in check. "Of all the tax proposals that are out there, the statewide property tax is the one that concerns us the most," says Farm Bureau lobbyist Rhedona Rose.

The irony about the power of the Farm Bureau is that farming is far from on the upswing; in fact, small farms are a dying breed. According to the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, only 27,680 households in Tennessee principally depend on farming as a source of income. This number is a tiny fraction of what it once was. It's also a small fraction of the number of households dependent on many other industries in rural Tennessee, such as the car industry.

Perhaps there is no more appropriate setting in which to consider the causes of the Right to Farm debate than rural Bedford County, known as the walking horse capital of the world. But like other counties in southern Tennessee, it's changing fast. In Bedford County, the car industry—not agriculture—is the big gorilla. Not only do many residents work for Saturn in adjacent Maury County, 1,000 people work for CalsonicKansei, an international firm with a plant in Shelbyville that makes heaters and air conditioners for cars.

Within a few hundred yards of the Darnell's pig farm is a row of newly constructed houses. One resident there, whose husband works for Saturn, says she has smelled the pigs many times but didn't know they pigs incited a lawsuit. "I guess I haven't really thought about it," she said. "I figured that when you move out into the country, that's the kind of thing you run into."

Bedford County farmers also have been affected by changes in farming economics. There was a time when small farms did a little of everything—grew some crops, milked some cows, had some pigs and cattle. Now, "it's gotten where you have to specialize and do just one thing in order to get by," one farmer explains while stopping by a gas station close to the Darnell's pig farm. Since the profit margin with a sizable hog operation is a lot better than the profit margin for a small hog operation, it makes a sense to go with more hogs than fewer hogs. "And a lot of pigs smell worse than a few," he says.

As places like Bedford County transform from agriculture centers to bedroom communities for other industries, the Farm Bureau believes that a strong Right to Farm law would send an appropriate signal to new residents. "When people buy land next to a poultry operation, they shouldn't do it with the belief that the poultry operation might one day go out of business or that it might never expand," Rose says. "They should assume that it's probably going to stay a poultry operation, and this bill is set up to give the farmer every chance to operate that operation the way he needs to."

None of this comes as a consolation to the Thompsons, who are tired of smelling pigs and even more tired of seeing remnants of pig manure on their property. The Thompsons don't know whether they'll win their lawsuit, but Mildred Thompson says she doesn't want to leave the place that she's always thought of as her home. And she can't stand the implication that she represents a way of life affiliated with newcomers and outsiders.

"We're not city folk," she says. "I was born here and lived here until the time I was married. I've raised cows and worked on this farm for much of my life, and that is a far cry from being city folk."