Ants are very smart insects, they work in groups and collectively reach their goals. Certainly they can do amazing things, like constructing tunnels, able to lift 50 times their own body weight (males can lift up to 850 times their own body weight), and they are also good swimmers being able to float and survive under water even for hours.
But there are other less known things that ants can do, one of them is that they are farmers! This may sound strange, but it’s not, in fact it’s a typical behavior of ants, they can actually grow their own food and herd their own “cattle”.

Ants make fungus from plants

Certain species of ants like the Atta colombica or the Apterostigma megacephala, and 200 more species of leafcutter ants, don’t eat the leaves they cut; instead they take the bits, to a special place in the colony where they chew the leaves making a paste in their mouth, and then spit it back out, however this is not enough to make it fermented which is the goal of this process, so ants do something that may seem gross to some: They poop on the chewed leaves and use their own feces as a fertilizer to create a big fungus that can digest grass. This fungus will be later fed with the leaves or grass the ants cut, and repeat the process until they can get enough fungus to feed the whole colony. So if we take into consideration that ants are as old as dinosaurs, we could say that ants invented the pesticides before we did.

Here you can watch an educational video created by BBC where a colony of Argentinian ants is farming grass to feed the big fungus and produce crops:

Grasscutter Ants Cultivating Crops - Insect Worlds - Episode 2 Preview - BBC Four

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Herding aphids

The ants will find aphids, and cut their wings off to prevent them from running away. There is also a chemical on ant’s feet that attracts aphids to make them know that it’s a safe place to be. Aphid’s diet is based on phloem, so the ants will feed them with plants and aphids will excrete honeydew, which is very similar to bee’s honey and it contains glucose and fructose that are very nutritious for ants. The process of herding aphids is very similar to what humans do with cattle. The ants stroke their belly, like if they were humans milk a cow and the aphid will produce Honeydew in return.
Here, the ladybugs and the beetles are like the lions and the hyenas in the jungle lurking their dam, but the ants will fight them and protect the aphids and their eggs as if they were protecting their own. So if you mess with aphids you mess with ants, and unless you have a flamethrower, you don’t want to mess with a colony of ants!

In this short video also from BBC you can see how ants herd and protect their livestock:

Crazy Ant Farmers - Weird Nature - BBC animals

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How ants contribute to the environment

Ants are not just amazing and curious; they are also very important for the ecosystem and without them, a lot of animals and plants would be affected, including us.

The main reasons:

• Ants help to aerate the soil: when ants dig tunnels, the air flows through the holes and changes the composition of soil, allowing plants to grow up, which will feed other animals and contribute to the environment.
• Ants control the population of other insects by eating them. Such as a lion controls the population of buffaloes or as wolf do with deers.
• Besides eating, they are also eaten by other animals, providing food for many vertebrate and invertebrate animals such as anteater, red worm lizards, some birds and even larger insects. (Also some humans)
• Sometimes, ants forget the seed they carried on their tunnels and it grows a new plant, creating completely green zones that will benefit the environment.

Conclusion:

Ants can be very invasive and sometimes annoying, when they are at our homes. However, they play a very important role on our planet, and without them, the world would not be the same. So, it’s also important to protect the habitat of those small insects that take care of our soil and the vegetation :)

Sources:

A Farmer Ant’s Unique Fungal Crop.
How ants keep contro lof their food.
How ants feed the fungus.
Modern farmers.
Ants selectively cultivate their crops.
A breakthrough innovation in animal evolution
More about crops cultivation.
Ecological importance of ants.
Aphids natural enemies.

Images: 1, 2, 3.

(All photos were taken from Maxipixel a free image source with quality pictures).