It’s the world’s smelliest fruit.

Some liken the taste to a kind of garlic custard. Others detect a combination of chives and caramel, or, perhaps more kindly, a pairing of vintage French cheese and sweet sherry.

Either way, the first experience of durian fruit and its creamy, fleshy innards, is sure to stick in the mind of those bold enough to give it a try.

It is these qualities that are quickly giving the ungainly, spiky-shelled fruit native to south-east Asia the stamp of ‘delicacy’ in some of the world’s most important markets, China chief among them.

China’s durian imports from Malaysia and Indonesia, the two biggest producers, have shot up from barely 100,000 in 2006 to nearly half a million today, according to durianharvests.com. Prices for the tropical fruit have risen accordingly to the point where a good-sized 4kg durian can fetch up to $100 at market.

If any produce has earned the label ‘cash crop,’ it’s the durian, whose moniker as ‘the king of fruits’ now fits like never before.

A single successful harvest on an average sized durian farm can keep a farmer’s family afloat for years. And with that kind of income at stake, growers are loath to leave their harvests to chance.

Nitrophoska® is EuroChem’s high-quality complete fertilizer solution combining all necessary nutrients for healthy plant growth in a single granule.

Yong Ching Yun, a product manager from EuroChem’s Malaysian distributer Behn Meyer, explains more:

“Farmers believe in EuroChem products, especially Nitrophoska®. If you are using a lousy, generic fertilizer around the market, you can’t guarantee that the product is good.”

One thing’s guaranteed, as Farmer Wu knows: using Nitrophoska® makes fur a fruitful harvest.