Yet another example of how the presumptuous Westerner cleared his fields of perfectly good crop materials, to replace the hardy local vegetables with exotics that may or may not acclimate as well to local conditions.
When the Boers came to South Africa they went to quite a lot of trouble to clear the land of antelope, creating mountains of useless carcasses where there used to be a stable ecology of eight or nine endemic species-- now, I believe, all extinct. In their place they introduced European cattle, which promptly caught the rinderpest, and died from it.
There's a lesson here, somewhere.
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