New Energy Farms president, Dean Tiessen of Leamington, Ont., was shot and killed in Brazil on Saturday, news reports say.
The southwestern Ontario farmer, businessman, and married father of four children was the victim in what appears to be a botched carjacking.
Tiessen was on a 10-day trip in Brazil for meetings related to New Energy Farms when he was shot twice, possibly as he tried to remove his seatbelt when ordered out of the vehicle by armed suspects, reports from Sao Paulo say.
With New Energy Farms, Tiessen began a global venture to grow the grasses and process them into dense pellets, which were marketed as fuel.
Tiessen received a Premier’s Award for Agri-Food Innovation Excellence in 2011 for growing miscanthus, a perennial grass and source of energy for the family farm’s greenhouse tomatoes.
