2005 Poultry Health Worker of the Year

Jewitt won the award for volunteering his BLT Farms as the index farm
in the PIC’s October 2004 avian influenza simulation, and for the many
days he has spent talking to farmers about the experience and what he
learned.

“This is humbling for me,” Len Jewitt said after accepting the honour of being named Poulty Industry Council’s Poultry Health Worker of the Year at the PIC’s November health conference.

Jewitt won the award for volunteering his BLT Farms as the index farm in the PIC’s October 2004 avian influenza simulation, and for the many days he has spent talking to farmers about the experience and what he learned.

Although Len said he had welcomed the opportunity to be part of the simulation, he admitted, “I was totally unprepared as to how that process would affect my head.” He said he underestimated the time involved to do the exercise and the negative impact it would have on him. But he knew the industry needed to be better prepared.

By opening up his farm and himself, it allowed researchers to find a number of holes that industry would need to fill to improve its biosecurity programs.

Meanwhile, Jewitt discovered changes that were required on even a very well-run farm in order to handle a foreign animal disease outbreak.

Jewitt also discovered that even a simulation was extremely stressful and that he had been personally unprepared. He says that the real thing would be much worse than any exercise.

“How different it would be for each and every one of us today, if, back in October, that exercise wasn’t really an exercise,” he said.

Over the past year, Jewitt has spoken to hundreds of farmers about his experience and those efforts really opened the eyes of other poultry farmers, the PIC said. Until they heard directly from another poultry producer, many didn’t realize the amount of work involved in stopping an infectious disease outbreak. 

The PIC said that Jewitt’s presentations have motivated farmers and industry into getting preparedness plans in place.

About Len Jewitt
Len was born and raised on a dairy/poultry farm in Waterloo. He and his brother Don later purchased the farm from their parents and Len took over the dairy end of the operation.
He attended the University of Guelph and graduated from the two-year Agriculture Diploma program.

Len married his wife Brenda Schlegel in the early 1970s. Shortly after, he and Brenda travelled to Bangladesh where Len spent three years as an Agriculture Aid Worker for the Mennonite Central Committee. He and Brenda have two daughters – Leanne and Fiona – both of whom were born in Bangladesh.

In 2002, Len and Brenda purchased BLT Farms Inc. in Moorefield from the Thomsen/ McClay family and decided to retain the BLT name. Len said the name ‘BLT’ seemed quite appropriate because it could easily stand for ‘Brenda and Len Together’ when in reality the previous owners intended it to refer to ‘Broilers, Layers, Turkeys.’ Together with their staff, they continue to produce birds from all four divisions of the poultry industry – broilers, layers, pullets, and turkeys.