Sometime in the new year, at a cattle farm in Port Hood, Cape Breton, Chris van den Heuvel will launch a software product that could save thousands of dollars each for hundreds of thousands of North American farmers.

Van den Heuvel is a software developer and the founder and sole proprietor of Fireblade Software, which monitors real-time data on cattle farms. By identifying areas of weak performance, Fireblade can help a farm save an estimated $7,500 per year, which goes directly to the operation’s bottom line.

“We’ve been using it on our own place and are just tweaking it before we do a launch,” said van den Heuvel in an interview this week.

The story of Fireblade Software began in June 2010 when van den Heuvel and his wife — both of whom come from farming families — took over her parents’ farm, which boasts 120 head of cattle, 60 of them producing milk.

Up to that point, van den Heuvel had worked as a software developer, designing solutions for private clubs and golf courses that take care of such things as tee times, inventory and reservations. As he got used to running a farm, he began to search for software that could help him improve efficiency.

But there was nothing that would allow him to monitor his operations in real time. So he began to develop his own software, and it produced data that showed him how to run the business more efficiently.

Over time, his personal software evolved into Fireblade, which measures such performance indicators as production per cow, feedstock per cow, fuel costs — hundreds of items, right up to such specifics as fuel costs per acre per cow. By monitoring such things, farmers can adjust their operations and improve their productivity.

Van den Heuvel plans to launch Fireblade for Atlantic Canadian dairy farms in the first quarter of 2013, working with agricultural agencies to hold seminars to explain the power of the software.

He said there are about 700 dairy farms in Atlantic Canada, 13,000 in Canada and 90,000 in the U.S., but he does not want to limit his product to the dairy market.

“We want to use the dairy sector as a proof of concept, then roll this out to other forms of agriculture,” he said, including sheep and hog farming, to name a couple. In total, he said, there are about 165,000 farms in Canada and 1.9 million in the U.S. Even if you strip out the hobby farms, there is a market comprising hundreds of thousands of farms.

Van den Heuvel said he will be looking for investment for the company, and wants to bring on staff to help him develop and market the product.