"And Then, From Hour to Hour, We Rot and Rot."

If Texas State University gets their way, in a few months, the river and beer won't be the only thing you smell while driving through San Marcos. Plans are currently in the works by TSU to create a 17-acre "body farm", a forensic field laboratory used to examine and study decomposing corpses. The field will be placed along Highway 21, at the university's horticultural center.

The Statesman reported that University Provost Perry Moore told local landowners it's "a done deal unless we hear something we haven't heard before." There are only two other such body farms in the nation--in Knoxville, Tennessee and Cullowhee, North Carolina. The San Marcos location would be the largest in the country.

These facilities help investigators learn more about what happens to a body when left to decompose outdoors. The field will be surrounded by a 10-foot-high fence with barbed wire; each corpse laying in the field will be given protective, vulture-proof cages. The field will have ten bodies at once--some buried, some out in the open. So far, six bodies have been donated to the program. In addition, a 70-foot area of grass will serve as a buffer around the site to absorb rain water runoff.

Texas States needs no approval by the city to develop on the site and it looks to launch the program by the end of the year. Local residents are currently fighting the site location, arguing that the site is frequented by coyotes, flies and vultures and that heavy rain would force flows of water from the site into the Blanco and San Marcos rivers. Which would be a total tubing buzzkill.

Photo by matchstick on stock.xchng