Which variations do you have in mind in particular? Are you going to fianchetto the bishop to g2?
I think of Bird's (that's how 1. f4 is called) as of a reversed Dutch, so it can be played like the Stonewall (placing pawns on f4, e3, d4, c3, the bishop on d3 as soon as possible) or like the Leningrad (g3, Bg2, d3, trying to respond by e4 to Black's d5-d4; queen's knight often goes to c4 through a3).
Black will usually respond 1... d5, so getting e4 in is the biggest problem for White. The light-square bishop remains 'bad' - blocked by own pawns, by f4 in particular.
I don't see so far how White's extra tempo can be used to make Bird's a really ambitious opening. I'm afraid it will score about 50% of points vs a same-skill Black player, whereas White should of course aim for 53-55%.
There's been some banter on the Stonewall formation recently in the LC thread, starting from
this post, in case you didn't notice.
I'd be glad to learn about any other piece setup ideas that would allow to score well with 1. f4.
Meanwhile, you can click through opening moves in free databases (database.chessbase.com, chesstempo.com, FICSgames.org) to see how well they (and mirror Dutch Defence (1. d4 f5) lines for Black) have scored in past games. (Interpret them with caution because transpositions may make results misleading, don't trust them that much if there were too few games played in a certain position. FICSgames results can be especially biased because a lot of games in a variation can belong to a single strong computer that plays it on that server, and don't forget to tick 'Include transpositions' there, otherwise you'll be shown only games with the same exact move order.)
When using this statistical approach, always ask yourself
why a certain variation scores so well or poorly, what the positional / tactical reasons for that are.
Last edited by coon74; 11-28-2014 at 08:43 AM.