Agricultural advertising in periodicals of the late 19th - early 20th centuries from the collection of NMHM

Depending on the stage of development, advertising as a historical phenomenon was expanding its sphere of influence penetrating more and more in various spheres of human activity. Agriculture, which is an important branch of the national economy closely related to the trade, always needs advertising. The absence of serfdom and the agrarian reforms have contributed to the integration of Bessarabian agriculture into the system of market relations. Local farmers needed promotion and marketing of agricultural products. For this they applied to various means of advertising. Agricultural advertisings can be found in the pages of the Bessarabian press from the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Most often, they were printed in publications of agricultural profile. An example is the magazine "Bessarabskoe sel'skoe khozyaistvo" ("Bessarabian Agriculture"), the publication of Agronomic Section of the Bessarabian Naturalists' Society and the Chişinău Department of the Imperial Russian Society for Horticulture. The magazine was published from 1908 to 1917. In the collection of MNHM there are 28 issues of this magazine (in all there were 240 issues). The years of publication: 1909, 1910, 1912 and 1916. They are the main source of research on the topic. The aim of this work is to determine the themes of agricultural advertisements and their contribution to the im- provement of agricultural management in Tsarist Bessarabia. All issues of the journal had the ads section. Regular customers of the journal were both local and foreign manufac- turers. Among the local: Fruit an Grape Nurseries "EKO" (Soroca); Bucovăţ Fruit and Grape Nurseries; Baron A. Stuart's Fruit Nursery (Chişinău); Cocorozeni Agricultural School; E.P. Melega-Kuzminskaia's estate of Temeleuţi and F.F. Köppen's estate of Voinovo-Ikel; Horticulture, Viticulture and Winemaking Bureau and Storage of Agricultural Machinery of N.G. Kavsan (Chişinău), etc. The ads offered planting material tested in local climate: fruit trees, local and foreign varieties of grape vine grafted onto American rootstocks, seed crops, as well as purebred cattle. Among the proposals there were met agricultural tools and machines made by known foreign firms.