RC (DLC); dateline at foot of text; endorsed by TJ as received 20 Feb. 1822, but recorded in SJL as received a day earlier; with Dft of TJ to Biddle, 20 Feb. 1822, beneath endorsement. RC (MHi); address cover only; with Dft of TJ to Bernard Peyton, 11 July 1824, on verso; addressed: “Thomas Jefferson Esq. Milton Virginia”; franked; postmarked Andalusia, 11 Feb. Enclosure: Biddle, Address delivered before the Philadelphia Society for promoting Agriculture, at its annual meeting, on the Fifteenth of January, 1822 (Philadelphia, 1822), observing that despite the customary veneration for the agricultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome, those societies lacked the “knowledge of the processes of vegetation, the composition of soils, and the rotation of crops, which have given to modern farming its dignity and value” (p. 10); admiring the agriculture of modern Italy, which “supports from its soil a population greater in proportion to its extent than any other” (p. 11); regretting that Great Britain leaves much of its land uncultivated and “does not raise grain enough for her own consumption” (p. 13); urging Pennsylvanians to farm their state’s own vast uncultivated lands; identifying “a disproportionate capital and an inefficient cultivation” as the primary reasons for Pennsylvania’s lower agricultural yields in comparison with Italy and Great Britain (p. 22); naming among “the defects of our husbandry” (p. 24) the failure to adopt efficient crop rotation based on soil and climate, raise the best cattle breeds, cultivate more root crops for feed, confine cattle so as to enhance the use of pastureland, and irrigate better; arguing that high labor costs do not make agriculture unprofitable and that instead “a capital employed in judicious agriculture, would yield quite as safe and abundant a return, as in most of the other pursuits of life among us” (p. 27); suggesting that Pennsylvania farmers pursue “the growth of wool, and the cultivation of flax and hemp” (p. 33); and maintaining that an increase in the number of agricultural societies in the state “would be among the surest means of promoting its improvement” (p. 36).