Have to dredge up this pic I made the LAST time I read about body farms.

You know how it is when you have vulture or coyotes that want to prey on your cadavers you have out rotting in fields.

From the article today

At the body farm, human bodies that have been donated to the facility will be observed as they decompose in a natural environment. The resulting data will help law enforcement officials more accurately pinpoint the time and nature of death in real-life cases. 

Researchers will be able to manipulate different factors to watch how bodies rot under different conditions such as on the surface of the ground, buried at different depths, in a vault or car trunk, under water and with other variables such as time of year and weather conditions.