Literature documents a correspondence between production of risk and the management of risk in a local context. Quantifying the relative importance of resilience indicators is therefore at a premium in policy circles. We propose a practical methodology for estimating the ex-ante resilience capacity of farm households. We propose an index of resilience capacity that can be estimated at the household level. The composite index is constructed from indicators sourced from Nigeria’s COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey (NLPS) data set. 3,000 households were selected from the frame of 4,934 households with contact details. Various household welfare indicators were analyzed using the factor component analysis and the generalized family of distance measures used for household ranking. The estimated Resilience Capacity Index (RCI) of a mean distance of 5 points and a +-1.5 standard deviation revealed a moderate farm households resilience capacity. Taken as a whole, the results from this study show that programs that build on absorptive, adaptive and transformation capacities will go a long way to strengthen the ability of agricultural households to recover from a pandemic shock. Based on these findings, the research highlights the need for development actors interested in promoting resilience in Nigeria to increase investments in strengthening access to essential services and functions like electricity, quality housing and livelihood strategies. Notwithstanding some of the analytical limitation, the essentials of resilience capacity framework have been advanced to motivate further research.