About 40 crocodiles killed a Cambodian man on Friday after he fell into their enclosure on his family's reptile farm, police said.

Luan Nam, 72, was trying to move a crocodile out of a cage where it had laid eggs when it grabbed the stick he was using as a goad and pulled him in.

The main group of reptiles then set about him, tearing his body to pieces and leaving the concrete enclosure at the farm in Siem Reap awash with blood.

"While he was chasing a crocodile out of an egg-laying cage, the crocodile attacked the stick, causing him to fall into the enclosure," Mey Savry, police chief of Siem Reap commune, told AFP.

"Then other crocodiles pounced, attacking him until he was dead," he said, adding that the remains of Luan Nam's body were covered with bite marks.

One of the man's arms was bitten off and swallowed by the crocodiles, he said.

Luan Nam was the president of the local crocodile farmers' association but his family may now sell his stock, after urging him for years to stop raising the reptiles, commune chief May Sameth told AFP.

Local media reported that the victim was from Po Banteay Chey village.

A two-year-old girl was killed and eaten by crocodiles in 2019 when she wandered into her family's reptile farm in the same village, the police chief said.

There are a number of crocodile farms around Siem Reap, the gateway city to the famed ruins of Angkor Wat.

The reptiles are kept for their eggs, skins and meat as well as the trade in their young.

The incident marks at least the second person killed by a crocodile this month. In early May, the remains of a missing 65-year-old fisherman in Australia were found inside two crocodiles.

Last year, two American tourists were injured by a crocodile at a resort in Mexico when one went swimming in the ocean at night and the other went in the water to help him.