Why F1 Bernedoodles Are Harder to Find

During the search for your perfect, healthy, loving Bernedoodle puppy, you may have noticed that most programs primarily offer multi-generation doodles. It’s a subtle fact that seems normal because it’s common for so many breeders. Well there’s a reason you see fewer F1 Bernedoodles available out there, and that’s because they’re harder to produce!

Purebred Breeding Dogs are Hard to Get!

Breeding programs work incredibly hard to produce the best puppies they can. For Doodle programs, that means healthy and adorable puppies that will be wonderful for your family. For Purebred programs, however, there’s the added goal of “perfecting the breed” and they work tenaciously to produce puppies that conform to the breed standard. This means generationally breeding dogs to improve their conformation, which is a slow and arduous process.

Now, imagine going to one of these Purebred programs and asking them for a dog to cross to an unrelated breed… The answer is generally “No”, The fact is that most purebred breeders don’t want their dogs used in non-purebred programs. It contradicts their aspirations to perfect a certain breed, which is completely fair given the ample work they put in. In this way, it’s very hard for Bernedoodle programs to get purebred dogs, let alone purebreds with exceptional health, coloring, etc.

Juggling the Revolving Door of Breeding Dogs

We’ve established that quality purebred dogs are hard to find for a Doodle program. Well another problem programs have when breeding F1 Bernedoodles is that we can’t keep our own puppies back! As much as we love them, our commitment to first generation puppies means that we can only have Bernese Mountain Dogs and Poodles in our program. By extension that means we constantly have to find new purebred dogs, which is difficult given that those breeders generally don’t want to sell them. It creates a whole new problem in terms of having to work harder to constantly get new dogs from external programs as our moms and studs retire. Multi-Gen programs simply hold their own puppies back… Oh how we wish it was that simple!

How Haystack Overcomes First-Generation Problems

If you’ve read our History Page, you know that breeding dogs is a family affair with us. We are incredibly fortunate that my mother Lynn is the owner of Haystack Acres, one of the premier Bernese Mountain Dog programs in the country. She’s spent 15 years perfecting her Berners, and we’re lucky to have the opportunity to get purebreds from her program. That takes care of the Bernese Mountain Dog side of our F1s problems.

The Poodle side, however, has been a tougher problem to solve. We don’t have relatives that are Poodle breeders and willing to let us breed to their dogs. Instead, we've spent much time developing relationships with some of the best Poodle programs in the country. Over the years of interacting with them, we’ve been able to demonstrate our commitment to ethical breeding and a Bernedoodle standard, which has made them comfortable enough with our values to allow us breeding rights on their dogs. It’s been quite the process, but we’re thankful to have such trusting relationships that are founded on a mutual drive to produce the highest quality puppies possible.

We’re very much committed to keeping Bernedoodles…well…Bernedoodles. Multi-Gens have taken over the market and while they are adorable, we maintain that there should be a breed standard even with Doodle crossbreeds. That is why we only breed F1 puppies and work through all of the headaches associated with that!