Food security and livelihoods among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are often constrained by limited farm resource endowment. It can be difficult to improve resource endowment given barriers such as low land availability and the unaffordability of agricultural inputs, so here we ask whether farmers can gain a better return on their resources through optimising their farm strategy in terms of the composition and/or diversity of crop and livestock species raised. Our survey of 1133 smallholder farmers in western Kenya and northern Nigeria, using a modified version of RHoMIS, suggested that choice of farm strategy can have a substantial positive impact on food security and farm incomes. In particular, we found that it was possible for farms with a high species richness but low resource endowment to achieve similar or better food security and income outcomes than farms with low species richness and high resource endowment. This indicates strong potential for diversification to im