This Farm Doesn’t Have Crops Or Livestock. What it Has is Terribly Morbid.

Somewhere in San Marcos, Texas there is 16-acre extra-ordinary ranch called The Freeman Ranch. Extra ordinary because instead of growing crops or raising livestock, they do something terribly morbid but quite necessary.

Across the ranch, more than 50 decaying human bodies are scattered. If you’re wondering, no, this is not some sort of serial killer hideout.

The Freeman Ranch is part of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University.

It is one of the key research institutes for studying how the human body decomposes.

The research from the Freeman Ranch has been invaluable to law enforcement agencies around the world.

It’s made doubly valuable by the fact that a similar “farm” would be illegal in Europe.

Donated bodies are used by researchers to see the effect of different weather conditions and terrain setting on the decomposition of human bodies.

New bodies are delivered to the ranch several times a month.

Researchers and graduate students must then clean and catalog the new bodies before they are put out into the field.

The new bodies are either placed out in the open where they are accessible to wildlife.

This method allows researchers to see the affect of bacteria and insects on decomposition. Some of the bodies are also placed inside a two-foot-high cage.

The body goes through three stages of decay when it’s inside the cage.

During the first stage, the body bloats out because the bacteria inside release gases as they consume the body’s carbon. Next is advanced decay. This happens after the body bursts and releases decomposition fluids. Finally, there is the dry decay stage, which comes when nearly all flesh on the body is consumed. This stage is usually reached after several weeks, and is the stage most of the bodies at the Freeman Ranch are in.

This is what a body looks like after several weeks when it’s not inside a cage.

This mangled ribcage is the result of a feeding frenzy of vultures and other wildlife.

Due to the nature of the research, Freeman Ranch has a high tech security system and is under constant surveillance.

However, researchers there say they have never had a problem with people trying to break in.

It’d be easy to say that what they do at the Freeman Ranch is morbid and gross. In fact, their research actually does a lot of good in the world. Read more about the Freeman Ranch at Vox.

Source: Vox