Small-scale farmers played an important role in agricultural change in Sudan, Eritrea and Djibouti in the first half of the twentieth century. They adopted new crops, irrigation techniques and land management patterns as part of a broader process of rebuilding after the devastation caused by war and disease in the 1880s and 1890s. Nonetheless, small-scale farmers were at the time and more recently in the scholarly accounts been characterized as ‘conservative.’ This article argues that this reputation derives from a misunderstanding of the relationship between small-scale farmers and colonial technical experts. Though these experts claimed special access to a uniquely powerful form of knowledge, their experiments and programs routinely failed. The aura of failure that came to surround these experts led small-scale farmers to avoid participating in their programs when possible. However, small-scale farmers were not closed to other forms of foreign knowledge. There is tantalizing fragmentary evidence that small-scale farmers adapted their practices as a result of their interactions with the large numbers of Yemeni farmers, West African pilgrims and former slaves that were moving into and within the region.