The USDA says 91% of U.S. farms are classified as small, usually family-run businesses, grossing less than $250,000 a year. That's a lot of local food production run on a shoestring budget, if any at all, with little to no access to customers outside of direct sales at a farmers market.

Then there are local, seasonal eaters looking for close-to-home farms, community-supported agriculture or local farmers market locations and schedules. Finding one unified, regularly updated and easy-to-reference source that connects you with nearby farmers no matter where you are in the country has been the stuff of dreams. It's also a seemingly Sisyphean task when you consider that the aforementioned 91% drops by an estimated 300-plus farms each week.

The Locavore app -- a project of Local Dirt founder Heather Hilleren -- achieves what was previously thought impossible: a seamless, well-managed and thorough app connected to a network of more than 35,000 farmers. They even get the local "what's in season" info right, down to the number of weeks left in the season, customized to your GPS-identified location. It seemed too good to be true, enough that we ran it through a serious obstacle course trying to find something wrong with it. What we found, after the jump.

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Tweet-a-Beer

At South by Southwest last week, Fiona Apple took the stage outside of L.A. for the first time in five years. Bruce Springsteen referenced "blue balls" in his keynote speech. In other news, the Tweet-a-Beer Twitter app also made its official debut, which is fitting considering many SXSW attendees spend more time pounding oat sodas than actually seeking out new music.

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We've all wished we could carry Anthony Bourdain around in our pockets when traveling to a new city, and now, the marketing geniuses over at the Travel Channel have figured out a way to make such a thing possible. In digital form, at least. Today they announced the new "Travel Channel Layover Guide With Anthony Bourdain" app for iPhone and iPad. (Sorry Droid and BlackBerry users, once again.)

Predictably, the app mimics the first season of his show The Layover, in which the Bourdain camp set out to help viewers avoid tourist traps in various world cities in favor of more fun and interesting local haunts. Bourdain didn't restrict his advice to just restaurant recommendations, though the show, and the app, include plenty of those.

For the moment, the Layover app features only the cities visited during season one, so if you happen to be visiting Singapore, Rome, Amsterdam, London, Montreal or Hong Kong in the near future, it's particularly worth your $1.99 to download. However, New York, Miami, San Francisco and, thankfully, Los Angeles, are also on the list.

As for Tony's L.A. recommendations:

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R.E. via the Squid Ink Flickr Pool

Ramen

Where were you on Valentine's Day? Did you go out? Did you stay home? Hit up a bar? While many of us were gorging on sushi or checking out the amazing Lauryn Hill concert, others were partying it up at the Key Club, or following our advice and getting "romantical" at LudoBites.

For those of you who use Foursquare -- the smartphone game that lets you check in to venues for points, bragging rights and the occasional cool deal -- we already know where you were.

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"Know What"

Images of app

​The Computer Age. The Digital Revolution. The Information Era. Many also say it's the Food Age. We're bombarded by facts and opinions on how, what and where to eat. How to choose? That's where technology helps by putting ideas into our hands, literally. More and more, travel and food guides are looking not only to the Web to share tips but also, of course, to apps. Examples include Zagat, Yelp and Urbanspoon. And hey, even LA Weekly.

Know What, an L.A. and San Francisco travel guide with plenty of food and drink ideas, is the newest to sidestep books and websites in favor of the app. Unlike other food guides we've written about recently, it doesn't focus on one specific slant. (Clean Plates lists what it deems healthy, sustainable options, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center National Diners' Guide considers labor practices.) Instead, "Know What" gives a variety of slants, each presented as an app-within-an-app. It's geared for locals and tourists alike.

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Does your New Year's resolution have you up against a wall yet? Introducing the Fooducate app, an app available for iPhones that helps the average food consumer shop for grocery foods. The app works like a scanner; it scans the barcode of foodstuffs and immediately produces a nutritional breakdown in layman's terms, highlighting things like the tablespoons of sugar per serving and hidden trans fats not shown on the nutrition facts.

Reaching for that guilty pleasure all the way in the back of your pantry? According to a recent scan of Pilsbury's Creamy Supreme Milk Chocolate, it will cost you "5 tsp of sugars per serving" and also "contains controversial artificial colors."

There are specialty foods that are not part of the database yet. Sorry guys, no truthful rundown on that can of garbanzos from Fresh & Easy yet. But the platform makes it really easy for you to add it yourself and help your fellow Fooducate classmates.

There are two versions available on iTunes: a free app with ads and an app without ads and a couple of extra perks for $3.99.

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If you're concerned about the levels of mercury in your seafood, particularly your sushi -- and you should be -- the Sierra Club is here to help. And not by telling you to go up to Yosemite and catch the fish yourself, with the ghost of John Muir and some fancy duds from REI. Although that's not a bad idea. Instead, the Sierra Club has taken the more convenient hi-tech approach, by creating an app for your iPhone or Android called Safe Sushi.

Launched to coincide with Mercury Awareness Week (Dec. 5-11) and the Obama Administration's first federal controls on mercury emissions from power plants, the app lists 38 varieties of seafood commonly used in sushi and indicates their mercury levels.

Listed alphabetically, from aji (horse mackerel) to awabi (abalone) to ikura (salmon roe) to uni (sea urchin roe), the app categorizes the sushi as high, medium or low in mercury. It also indicates actual mercury levels of each -- 0.21 per mil for katsuo (bonito) -- and tells you whether the fish is sustainably harvested or unsustainably harvested and therefore better to avoid entirely.

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Gwyneth Paltrow shoots a video for Goop City.

​With Goop, her website/newsletter devoted to... everything, Gwyneth Paltrow somehow manages to achieve the rare feat of being simultaneously earnest and sincere yet utterly clueless and risible. Questionable recipes and peppy advice about enjoying the simple pleasures of life? We'll buy it. Impossibly rigorous exercise regimens and obnoxiously expensive designer must-haves for the "ordinary woman"? Yeah, right.

Whether you fall into the "love Gwyneth" or "love to hate Gwyneth" camp (we vacillate between the two), you can now get more of her. While Gwynnie -- whose cookbook My Father's Daughter was published in April; check out the review -- was busy running around with a butterfly net, trapping the stray thoughts that float across her mind like errant butterflies, a tech team has been hard at work on expanding the lifestyle website into a mobile app, Goop City Guide ($3.99), which launched yesterday.

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Easy As Pie

​Update: 11/17, 8:30 a.m. Easy As Pie app is now available. You can download it here in the iTunes store. The original piece, published 11/16, is below.

Evan Kleiman takes her love of pies to a new level with Easy As Pie, an iPhone and iPad application that debuts tomorrow. We took a quick test drive of the app (without actually baking the recipes), which costs $4.99. It's easy to use, visually appealing and made us hungry for a sour cream plum pie.

Divided into categories like Crusts, Toppings, Specialty Pies, Pudding Pies and Evan's Favorites, the app includes downloadable and shareable ingredient lists, recipes for 18 pies, 4 crusts and 4 toppings, and videos that show the pies being made in real time -- with all the challenges and imperfections that can occur.

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​A little late for last year's check-in app rage, but just in time for the third annual LA Beer Week comes another new Android and iPhone app for beer geeks and casual macro-enjoyers alike.

UNTAPPD started out last year as a web app that allowed users to share their current beer choices with others in the cloud, but last week the company rolled out their official mobile app (which is free!), making it easier than ever to use beer's latest social-network on the go.

As FourSquare for beer, the app allows you to "check into" a specific brew you are drinking (which is beautiful imagery for those of us who have ever wanted to literally hang out inside of our favorite liquid). And just like Spotify and GetGlue, it will update your Facebook and Twitter with the news of what is going down at that very moment.

Sounds like a familiar concept to the types who insist on disclosing the innocuous details of their everyday life on Internet (or to beer geeks already involved with location-based beer apps such as Beerby and Taphunter), but UNTAPPD is more than just another instance of Twitter-inspired navel gazing.

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