REDUNDANCY notices sent to Elders branch managers by mistake have been blamed for the recent exit of 20 the company's Victorian livestock staff.

Most have joined the rival Rodwells network, a subsidiary of RuralCo.

Elders Rural Services managing director Mike Guerin admitted the error this week, saying that redundancy notices were never meant for branch managers but rather senior staff at state-office level.

But he refused to say how the incident occurred or who was to blame for it.

"I guess we can describe it as an internal mishap," Mr Guerin said. "It's pretty emotional when you get faced with a redundancy, but as soon as we discovered the problem we went about fixing it."

Mr Guerin said the blunder was an embarrassment for Elders, which has just begun a major national restructure that will see the replacement of state offices with 20 regional offices.

Under the restructure, Victoria has been divided into five regions, some of which will overlap into NSW and South Australia.

Mr Guerin said the company identified the impact of the problem only a fortnight ago.

"We have a list of every customer in Victoria," he said.

"Most of the good people in pink shirts have been allocated to ring them to provide reassurance that Elders would not be dropping its efforts."

Mr Guerin this week confirmed the appointments of Victoria's remaining two regional sales managers - Ron Creek (North East) and Rob Massina (Gippsland).

The other three appointments announced recently were Justin Gummer (Western District), Peter Fitzgerald (Wimmera, Mallee, central Victoria) and Alan Sundblom (southern Riverina, Wodonga).

And while Elders had lost staff to Rodwells, Mr Guerin was pleased to announce the traffic wasn't all one way with the appointment of RuralCo deputy manager John Molenaar as head of Elders' national operations.

Mr Guerin was also confident that over next few weeks he will be able to announce the recruitment of key people who will be changing "the colour of their shirts".