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When Toni-Maree Shaddock started work at Baiada's chicken processing plant in Ipswich 17 years ago she thought she had a job for life.
But she is one of 250 workers forced to look for a new job, after the site closed its doors today.
"I thought I was going to be there forever and had resigned myself to the fact that I would be working there right up until my retirement," Ms Shaddock said.
The company notified workers of its plans in August and has progressively laid-off staff since then.
"They called us all up into the eating room and were told the news and it was very devastating for a lot of people," she said.
"Shock really set in and even weeks afterwards we still didn't believe it was really happening."
In a region with an unemployment rate of 8.3 per cent, the fourth-highest in Queensland, many have chosen to relocate to take up opportunities elsewhere.
Re-training is another option, which is the path Ms Shaddock has chosen.
She has signed up for a six-month course that she hopes will lead to work in aged care, a far cry from her duties at Baiada which included training staff and preparing chicken meat for consumption.
The Australasian Meat Industry Employees' Union Queensland secretary Matt Journeaux said many former Baiada employees were following suit.
"A lot of these people are young and have a lot of working life ahead of them, and the opportunities to work in Ipswich are decreasing so most of them are looking at alternative careers," he said.
"These are salt-of-the-earth working people and lot of the skills are transferable to other industries, however, poultry processing is a unique industry in itself as well."
Baiada will continue to use the Ipswich site as a distribution hub, employing 100 people.
It is also locked in negotiations with the Queensland Chicken Growers Association (QCGA), which represents the 28 farmers who have had their contracts cut.
Between them, they supplied 23 million chickens to the facility each year.
QCGA declined to comment, pending the ongoing negotiations, while Baiada told the ABC it has nothing to add to its initial announcement of the closure last year.
Ipswich West MP Jim Madden said farmers were finding it difficult to secure contracts with other chicken processors.
"They are investigating other companies that need chicken meat, like Golden Cockerel in Brisbane, so hopefully there will be other companies that can buy their products but other than that they are in a very difficult situation," Mr Madden said.
"You can only move chickens a certain number of hours and that means you have to have your farm near where the company is that is taking your product.
"It is not as though they can switch to eggs. These are purpose-built to produce chickens for us to eat as meat and there is only a certain number of companies that taken them as a product."
Topics: company-news, business-economics-and-finance, food-processing, ipswich-4305, wacol-4076, brisbane-4000, qld, australia