The Ash Twins Blog

The first ant farm was introduced in 1929 and patented in 1931 by Dartmouth engineering professor Frank Austin. It appears that Austin built his ant farms for his own enjoyment because he did not go on to start a business around his idea.

In 1956, novelty toymaker Milton Levine was watching ants on the sidewalk when he asked his partner, Joe Cossman, “Why don’t we come out with some kind of observation toy so kids can watch ants at home?” They began selling “home ant habitats,” which comprised a plastic box, a bag of sand, and a vial of ants. These home ant habitats were immediately popular. Levine and Cossman eventually settled on a farm theme for their product, and they registered “Ant Farm” as a proprietary trademark. Ant farms are considered to be educational, fun, and relatively low maintenance. Over 20 million ant farms have been sold under the Uncle Milton brand name.

Interestingly, discussion of ant farms uniformly refers to the collective farm as a toy, rather than to the individual ants as pets. Ants appear to be too alien to our humanizing sensibilities to be treated as pets/friends the same way we treat dogs and cats. I would conjecture that ant farms fascinate children because it gives them the semblance of control over an ecological environment, similar in principle to the control over ecologies that would have ensured social and ecological fitness among evolving hominids.