The mission yerbales - planting Ilex paraguariensis instead of harvesting it wild

Yerba mate was gathered wild, in forests weeks from anywhere, by conscripted carriers, and the death toll was notorious enough that the order profiting from the trade wrote it down. The reduction towns of Paraguay answered by planting the tree, with stock carried from the Maracayu hills, in what modern agronomy calls the first domestication of the species. The plantations went wild after the expulsion and the art was not recovered until the twentieth century.