Learning these skills will help you save money, eat better, and live healthier. And you need to live out in the middle of the countryside to apply some of these skills to your everyday life. Remember, the more skills you learn, the better prepared you'll be for when SHTF.

1- Food Preservation It’s rare to find people who preserve their own foods, but in our grandparent’s generation, it was common. Canning food, smoking meats and even making one’s own sausage were all common home tasks, which ensured that people had enough food to get through the winter. Today, it’s rare to find people who know these methods of food preservation, let alone having the equipment needed. If we go back very far in American live, pretty much every middle class home had a smokehouse for preserving meats. I’ve seen some homes where the smokehouse was actually in the kitchen chimney. Instead of building a normal chimney, they had a very wide one, with enough room to hang sides of beef in it for smoking.

2- Herbal Medicine The roots of medicine were herbal medicine. While doctors have existed for millennia, it hasn’t been until recent times that those doctors had such a wide range of pharmaceuticals to work with. Before that, doctors made their own medicines. Many women also learned to use what nature provided for medicine. It was not uncommon a few generations back for mom to take care of her family’s medical needs, using recipes that she had learned from her mother. Today, that sort of medicine is called “old wives’ tales” but it works just as well as it always did.

3- Animal Husbandry Although the industrial revolution took place more than 100 years ago, many people continued to raise at least a small amount of their own livestock at home. This led to cities enacting ordinances limiting what animals people could keep within city limits. Raising dogs and cats is much different than raising chickens, rabbits and goats for the table. A large part of being able to raise these animals is recognizing their needs and being able to diagnose their sicknesses. Farmers don’t depend upon the vet for most illnesses; they take care of it themselves.

4- Repairing and mending We are a society that consumes without thinking and this trend is aggressively promoted by the media. Your great-grandparents didn’t let anything go to waste, not even a beat-up pair of jeans and it was a common practice for every other article of clothing they owned. Mending clothes was part of a woman’s chores and they took pride when restoring the favorite clothes of their loved ones. It wasn’t only about clothes, it was about anything that can be fixed or patched up, and it was a sustainable way of living. These are skills that someday might come in handy and you should be able to know how to fix the things you need. When was the last time you fixed something? If you can’t remember it, you’re probably not the handyman type.

5- Basic Carpentry Everyone should know how to make basic repairs to their home. Without the ability to repair damage from a natural disaster, it might not be possible to use the home as a survival shelter. Woodworking skills also allow one to make furniture and other items to help survive.

Some of these skills may take a little time and investment to get things started, but once you successfully start your endeavors, you'll reap the benefits almost immediately. For more skills that every survivalist should learn, check out Goods Home Design.