When talking about local fruits, many Malaysians would default to the usual names like durian, mangosteen, and rambutan. But one crop that commonly gets left out is dragon fruit.
Despite not being native to the country, it’s a fruit that the people of Sepang are more than familiar with. The township has about 181.45ha of dragon fruit farms based on The Star’s report last year.
And one of the more notable ones is HL Dragon Fruit Eco Farm, which sports a Guinness World Record for its large dragon fruit structure.
A record-holder in more than one way
We aimed to build a landmark in Sepang because dragon fruit is very well known here, but we didn’t have a structure to represent it,” Eugene Chia, the eco farm’s managing director, told us while we dined at its in-house restaurant.
To rectify this, they built “Malaysia’s Largest Dragon Fruit Shaped Structure” in 2020. A year later, it was awarded by The Malaysia Book of Records, followed by the Guinness World Record in late 2023.
Standing at over 9m tall, the structure was erected in hopes of boosting the local tourism industry. And so far, it seems to be working.
On most weekends and public holidays, you’ll find tourist buses and families driving up HL Dragon Fruit Eco Farm’s gravel roads. Many of them are part of private agency-based tour groups and visit the farm for its agrotourism activities.
There, you can personally take part in dragon fruit planting and harvesting. Some of its tourism packages even allow you to help pollinate the fruit’s flowers which only bloom at night.
It’s not a revolutionary offering per se, as other fruit farmers in Malaysia have leveraged this to expand their businesses. Just look at how those in Cameron Highlands market their strawberry-picking activities.
But in Sepang, you could say that HL Dragon Fruit Eco Farm is pioneering this business model.
