Image above description
Left: Where I’ve gotten to with them today. Right: Where I started in 1974.

I have seen a conversation on facebook about people having problems breeding White Chinese Geese. With any purebred breeding program whether it be, goats, cows, poultry etc, breed standards are in place to guide breeding.  

Each standards committee passes policy to aid the breeder in breeding to the standard. In my experience most standards policies consider a breed to be a pure breed once it is breeding true to type and colour over 5 generations.  The APS (Australian Poultry Standards) new breed or variety policy released in 2015 supports this.

 As with any breeding program everything is dependent on the foundations you set with your stock, or the stock you start with and your effort to breed to the standard.  I cannot stress enough how important patience and measured breeding effort are when breeding to any standards. Due to our strict boarder securities we are restricted in the access we have to new breeds and blood lines. It’s just a case of working with what we have available. 

I established a line of White Chinese in Australia back in the early 1970’s. I created one line of White Chinese from crossing Brown Chinese geese and Embden geese. My goal in this venture was to maximise egg production for my commercial outlet breeding 1500 to 2000 gosling a year. I used Chinese geese because they have higher egg production and Embden geese for weight and because processors prefer to process white feathered birds.

Enjoying the quality of the White Chinese geese I pursued breeding a second line for hobby purposes. I was lucky to come across a lady that had had a flock of Brown Chinese geese for over 30yrs and assured me that she never introduced anything else into the flock but for whatever reason this flock of 30 Brown Chinese geese had produced 5 pied goslings.  Not knowing where this pied had come from I purchased the whole flock and then established a second line of White Chinese geese from the Pied Brown Chinese geese.  Some 40 odd years later I continue to breed pure White Chinese geese in compliance with the APS2 and enjoy success in show with this line. 

Back in the day I had shown my White Chinese in the “any other variety” section at the Sydney Royal Easter Show.  RAS Councillor David White approached me one day saying that the RAS wanted to create a class for the White Chinese in the show and asked for my support.  

As a result White Chinese have been included in the Australian Poultry Standards since their first publication.  It brings me much pleasure to see how this breed of goose has developed over the years to the point where good pure White Chinese geese are found throughout Australia.