Craving a taste of his native Liberia 4,500 miles away, maintenance worker Alfred Jones drove just 20 miles from his New Jersey home and waded knee deep into rows of pick-your-own African vegetables at Morris Gbolo’s World Crops Farm… New Jersey’s location is the reason the legislature approved the nickname in the first place in 1954, said Richard VanVranken, a Rutgers agricultural agent… “It was about everything in New Jersey being ripe for the picking for New York and Philadelphia. That drives a lot of what we do, being able to serve the huge markets that we’re right in the middle of,” VanVranken said… Agritourism is now a source of income for one in five farms in New Jersey, which relies more heavily on agritourism than other states, Schilling said. While New Jersey ranks 40th in the U.S. in total farm sales, it is ninth in the nation in terms of agritourism income, he said… To insure a fertile future for the Garden State, Rutgers agricultural agents put to work the results of a 2006 study of Asians and Hispanics on the U.S. East Coast that found they tend to spend more money each month on fresh fruits and vegetables than the national average and that purchasers of ethnic foods put food freshness ahead of price.