Africa’s small farms face shortages of labor, land, animal traction and financing that, together, limit their access to improved technologies. This paper evaluates a series of conservation farming technology packages as possible vehicles for incrementally raising productivity and incomes among resource-poor farm households in Africa. Discussion focuses on asset-poor households in Zambia’s cotton zone, where a majority of farm families till with a hand hoe and where conservation farming is most well established and best suited agronomically.