Reseeding grass with lots of ants?

Hi!

Unfortunately, we do have a large ant population and due to that we haven't had much success with all the seeds our grass produces at the end of spring. It just feeds the ants.

And because the ants steal all the seed produced by the grasses that we have, the gaps between the grass plants won't be filled.

We practice rotational grazing with a mob of 40 head in small paddocks of about 5000m2. That has improved the soil and plants do grow taller. But without the seed, we continue to have a lot of gaps.

We've thought about adding chickens so that they will go after the ants and then we might be able to spread seeds and use the cows to trample them in. Someone suggested to use sheep but we don't have them and we can't borrow a herd for the job.

Any other ideas how we can successfully reseed?

I put my vote in for chickens. I have taken down a few large ant hills by dropping a full chicken tractor on top for a day. My method has been, first thing in the morning shift the tractor on top of an ant hill and take it off in the evening. When it comes off I can't see any ants at all, and the hill will be leveled by the scratching. It doesn't completely kill them, there are still a few left underground, but it takes months before they manage to build a noticeable hill.  I used meat chickens, layers would probably be even better because they are more interested in scratching.

Poultry manure also makes grass grow incredibly thick.

That sounds good.

So probably the best method would be to put a chicken tractor or a mobile coop with electric netting around a small area there, let the chicken work and when rain is in the forecast we remove the chickens and start spreading the seeds. We could put the the cows on the area after spreading the seeds to let them trample them in.