Stockpiling food, water, and other supplies is a good start when it comes to being prepared for anything. However, all preppers know that you also need to learn as many skills as possible. Since you'll likely  be living off the land for a long time having the skills necessary are even more vital. If you know how to get your own food, and treat basic medical conditions these skills just might save your life!

Five self- sufficiency skills you should know are: 

Hunting 

If you can hunt for your food, chances are you won’t need to buy any. Of course, you can always buy whatever you’d like from a grocery store, but if you’re a huge fan of eating meat, and don’t really care for extra carbs besides potatoes, you could do quite well getting your grocery store bill down to zero just hunting and growing food in your own garden.

 Fishing

As a matter of fact, if you’re happy eating fish as your main protein, you could replace hunting with teaching yourself to fish, and alongside gardening, be fine without spending any money on food altogether.

Natural Remedy Gardener

While you likely will still buy medicine for more serious colds and illnesses, growing ginger, mint, and other medicinal herbs for things like stomach aches and the starts of the common cold will really help you and your family come cold & flu season.

Basic First Aid

You could end up saving yourself, your family, and your friends a lot more than the cost of a hospital visit having taught yourself how to do basic first aid: you may even end up saving them a lot of pain and preventing infections from taking place in cases where you happen to be in remote locations that are difficult for emergency services to get to quickly.

Knife Sharpening

Sharp knives are important. So very important that chances are you’re going to want to pay those exorbitant fees for a knife sharpener to sharpen your knives at least every few years. But the cost of getting your knives sharpened for you once is pretty steep when you consider how easy it is for you to sharpen yourself: and the fact that if you do sharpen them yourself, they’re likely to stay sharp a heck of a lot longer.

There are many ways to sharpen even stainless steel knives (some of the hardest knives to sharpen yourself), so that even if you aren’t a fan of sharpening one way, chances are there’s at least one method of sharpening that you’ll be happy to learn to do yourself.

If you know these skills and practice them before a collapse occurs, you will be in a much better situation when a disaster does happen.  If you know how to hunt, fish, use herbs for health conditions, know basic first aid and how to sharpen knives you and your family can feel safer knowing that you will be ready for anything.

These skills will not only safe you money but they may just help you survive. That is why knowing these skills is not only important but crucial for any prepper.

To learn more self-sufficiency skills that you should know when SHTF, visit More Than Just Surviving.