In an oil refinery, liquid fuels, such as gasoline and diesel, form the bulk, relatively low value products, while the plastics, dyes and chemicals provide the higher value, "niche" markets.
Luca Gamberini, whose family has been running the Ocean Reef Group for six decades, acknowledges this is a sticking point, but firmly believes underwater farming can be more than just a plaything for growing high-value, niche crops.
The syllabus, approved by Camp Pendleton's transition assistance program, includes hands-on planting and irrigating, lectures about "high-value niche markets" and production of a business plan that is assessed by food professionals and business professors.
Mr. Quinn, who has 10,000 black currant bushes at his farm in Staatsburg, N.Y., along with almost 7,000 red, white and pink currant bushes, touts black currants' health benefits and hopes they will become a high-value niche crop.
In this way, organic livestock products will have considerable potential for high-value niche markets.
The island of course grows many other crops, and artisan farming has blossomed on the island state in recent years, where small enterprises beaver away making high-value, niche specialities, including hand-ground spelt and rye flour along with boutique jams and relishes.
Atlantic halibut (Hippoglossus hippoglossus) is a high-value, niche market species for cold-water marine aquaculture.
The growing awareness of, and demand for, better healthcare, particularly in developed nations, is a major factor in moving the medical textile market towards high value added niche product segments.
With the right opening up of trade, European and American brand names, with high value added, and technology driven, niche and custom-built products and services, could be providing us with engines of growth and employment as demand for these products and services rises in Asia (as well as in other areas with increasing consumer power, like Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and parts of Africa).
Our third devised metric, spreading concentration, compares the user social network with the subnetwork consisting of users who collected a given item and reaches high values especially for niche items that spread locally among friends (i.e., the subnetworks corresponding to them are dense).
