Ant hills are a great source of natural minerals for sheep.
Channel: Zwartbles Ireland Suzanna Crampton
Date: 2022-04-27

Inca finds them easy to dig. Ants dig deep down into soil to mill the earth and engineer amazing homes for themselves. In doing so they mine deep nutritious minerals that sheep instinctively know that they need. Which obviously are not in their food, mineral bucket and different from all the green plants they eat. Cows, horses even pig and chickens do this eating of ant hills. We must also not forget hedge hogs which eat loads of ants.



Zwartbles Ireland is a small company run from a farm in County Kilkenny in Ireland. We are a regenerative farm which means restoring soils health and regenerating its natural carbon and nutrient cycle with biodiversity of pasture sward with grasses, legumes, forbs and herbs. This also means we farm with nature. Healthy soils are important for healthy environment. So we encourage all life from the microbial to dung beetles, ants, pollinators to flora biodiversity, birds, hare, hedgehogs, rabbits, fox, badger as well as our livestock. This mean we farm in a style of mob grazing and giving fields long rest times between grazings. We have seen a huge increase and return of wildlife including woodcock and snipe in winter months foraging for dung beetle larvae, red squirrel, wood peckers and pine martens. We also have the rare natter bat and previously thought extinct Tawny Mining bees.
We sell, Zwartbles sheep, Zwartbles blankets and yarn made from the sheep, and calendars featuring Inca the World's Smallest Sheepdog and her coworkers. We also sell alpaca yarn spun for our own alpaca. Our yarns are 100 percent natural, grown by our sheep which grazing our small green Irish fields. This wool is naturally sequestered carbon which you can then knit into warm environmental friendly clothing.