My Nemesis - Fire ants

I hate fire ants.  Seriously.  Our pasture is full of them.  Mounds and mounds of fire ants litter the landscape.  In the yard, I've thrown up the white flag and will purchase a bag or three of Amdro and poison them as I don't like to be bitten by them.  The pasture and garden, though, is another matter. We try not to use any pesticides where our animals roam and eat since we don't want the chemicals around things that we're going to end up eating.

This has led to an interesting dilemma.  The fire ants build huge mounds.  Some of them are over a foot tall.  Being that chickens love to eat bugs, I thought that maybe the chickens would eliminate them.  That proved to be a faulty assumption.  The ants don't seem to bother the cows, goats and chickens, but they bother me.  When it rains the ants ball up and float until they get to higher ground and inevitably I'll step in them and my ankles will be covered with bites.  Or they'll seek someplace high and dry like the nesting boxes in the chicken tractor.  When we go to collect eggs, the nesting box will be full of fire ants.

A huge fire ant mound

Even when they aren't biting you, they cause other problems.  For one, their tunneling pushes up weed seed and bitterweed and other pesky weeds will grow from the middle of the ant pile.  I'll pull those so they don't produce seed and proliferate across the mostly weed-free pasture.  Then, and arguably the most troublesome is just the existence of the mounds.

I have 3 chicken tractors in the pasture that are on wheels.  The meat birds will reside in one and the pullets will reside in the others until they are old enough to lay and then I'll open the doors and let them free range.  The problem with the ant mounds is that when you go to push the chicken tractor to fresh grass each day, you hit an ant pile and you must either lift the tractor up and over the pile or move the tractor to avoid it.  It's just troublesome.

Dadgum ants!

I've tried several 'natural' ways to eradicate them.  Someone said sprinkling instant grits on the ant pile would get 'em.  The theory is that the ants eat the grits and then when the grits get wet in their stomach, the grits expand and blow up, thus killing the ant.  We tried it and had no success.  Not only was it not successful, it was wasteful and blasphemous for a Southerner to do such a thing to grits!

I tried another method that told to use the ants' territorial nature as a weapon against them.  This was indeed a 'shovel-ready job' but wasn't funded by any government stimulus dollars.  You were to take a shovelful of dirt and ants from one mound and put it on a neighboring mound and vice versa.  The theory was that the ants from neighboring "tribes" would battle each other and kill each other off.  No noticeable effect.  Benjamin and Russ have been known to put firecrackers in ant mounds and light them.  This is great fun.  The mound is blown up and it kills many ants, but this isn't really an efficient way to get rid of ants.

We tried putting fresh cow poop on top of ant piles.  We have plenty of that around! You know what?  This actually works - not to kill them, but they all pack up their little suitcases and move (to another location nearby), so it is not a real panacea. One thing that works is pouring boiling water on the mounds.  I'll boil 8 cups of water in the microwave and then carefully carry the bowl outside and pour on top of the mound.  This cooks the ant pile and ants and kills the colony.  This is loads of fun if you are bored, but really isn't practical if you have numerous ant piles spread out over acres of pasture.

So bottom line is, I'm still looking for a natural way to kill all the fire ants on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  At this point I'm still searching for a solution and I can't seem to find one of these guys for sale on Amazon.com.

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If you have any natural ways to kill fire ants, I'd love to hear from you.