Australia's largest meat processor JBS Australia said it is committed to northern Victoria and northern Tasmania.

That is despite offering 190 redundancies to workers at its Cobram plant and another 40 at the company's Longford sheep processing line this week.

Workers have been stood down while both abattoirs have been temporarily closed.

They were amongst the 86 JBS Australia workers on the lamb line temporarily stood down in February at the Longford meatworks, due to a lack of supply.

Chief operating officer with JBS Southern, Sam McConnell said a decision on the future of both plants would be made when lamb numbers improve.

"At some stage we want to re-open the plants, when the livestock availability is there.

"The assets are worth a lot of money, you can't just close and mothball."

Mr McConnell said its Longford plant would require at least 104,000 lambs across 52 weeks of the year to consider re-opening.

He said the Cobram site would need up to 500 head a day, which includes mutton, goats and lamb.

Lamb numbers in Tasmania have been tight for some time on the back of an interstate exodus.

The latest figures from Tasmania's Red Meat Forecast Committee estimated lambs shipped to Victoria in the 2016-17 financial year would be in excess of 255,000.

The state's Northern Midlands Mayor David Downey said the job losses were a big blow to the community.

"Very sad to hear the news that 40 workers have been made redundant."

"It's another 40 jobs that have gone from our region.

"It is a concern but lets also hope that those people will find other work elsewhere as the rest of the economy is slowly picking up."

Troy Baker from the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union said the redundancies will give the workers closure.

"It's a chapter in their life and they can actually move forward instead of being strung along on a string."

"We're of the opinion that those that have resigned have done it through duress and have been forced into it in order to access some type of government funding so those people should also be paid their redundancies."

The Tasmanian Government said the decision was very disappointing and it would work with affected employees to find them new jobs.

JBS said it has offered to transfer a number of workers to other sites across the country, but so far workers had shown little interest.