After inheriting his father's large estate, he expanded it into a model farm, where he developed and tested new methods of horticulture, agriculture and forestry.

Having been requested by the French Academy of Sciences to investigate a disease which was destroying the saffron plant in Gâtinais, he discovered the cause in a parasitical fungus which attached itself to the roots.

[3] Having learned from Sir Hans Sloane that madder possesses the property of giving colour to the bones, he fed animals successively on food mixed and unmixed with madder; and he found that their bones in general exhibited concentric strata of red and white, while the softer parts showed in the meantime signs of having been progressively extended.

[3] In his additions to l'Art de l'Épinglier (The Art of the Pin-Maker, 1761), Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau wrote about the "division of labour": This text is believed to have inspired Adam Smith for his famous work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published in 1776.

Following the work of René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, in 1757 Duhamel released the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers and opposed the writers of the Encyclopédie.

In 1773, the appointment of Condorcet as deputy Grandjean de Fouchy sees the triumph of the party of the philosophers against the use of naval officers linked to Duhamel.

But in January 1775, supporters of Bailly, including Patrick D'Arcy and Jean-Charles de Borda, both naval officers make up a commission to monitor the work of the Secretary, that Condorcet considered censorship.

Condorcet would later refer to this episode: Asteroid 100231 Monceau, discovered by astronomer Eric Walter Elst at the La Silla Observatory in 1994, was named in his memory.