The Body Farm is a two-acre patch of wooded hillside where as many as 40 bodies at a time lie decomposing, arrayed in settings of typical crime scenes. The bodies reside in the trunks or back seats of rusting cars, hidden beneath underbrush, buried beneath a few inches of topsoil, and held underwater by rocks. The seeds of the Body Farm were sown in 1977, when Bass recognized that scientists knew very little about how bodies decay. He determined that the only way to increase scientific knowledge in this area was to monitor the process of body decay in conditions similar to those used by killers in attempting to hide their victims. This article describes how the knowledge gained from the Body Farm has been used in a number of actual cases. The Body Farm's method of obtaining bodies for observation, however, has met with criticism. In 1995 a Nashville television station reported that bodies of several homeless veterans, who had gone unclaimed after their deaths, were decaying at the Body Farm. The story provoked outrage among some veterans' groups and prompted State legislators to draft a bill to bar the Body Farm from accepting unclaimed corpses. The State's district attorneys rallied behind the Farm's use of unclaimed corpses, arguing that termination of the study of body decomposition would greatly restrict the presenting of evidence in murder trials.