Between Silicon Valley and Hollywood lays California's Central Valley, the oft-ignored and most fruitful base of agriculture in the country. For years, farmers along Interstate 5 have staked poster signs outside of blackened fields, proclaiming, "CONGRESS STARTED THE DUST BOWL." This week, President Trump may have saved it.

Because of the sheer magnitude of the San Francisco Bay area and the Los Angeles metropolitan area, California is the bluest state in the union, but the farmers in the state's center have long warred with the environmental lobby over a species of tiny, three-inch fish: the delta smelt. To keep the state's freshwater available to the long-diminishing population of delta smelt, environmentalists successfully lobbied Sacramento to massively restrict the state's waterways, crippling California's agricultural production and forcing billions of gallons of freshwater to be dumped into the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta instead of using it for farming.

Most absurdly, the state's restrictions don't respond to climate fluctuations, so in rare but vital times of rain, water in the delta which could be used for farming without even depriving the fish is instead literally drained into the ocean.

The devastation faced by California's farmers was terrible. Six of the nation's seven most agriculturally productive counties became cut off completely from their Central Valley Project federal water supplies due to state restrictions. Driving up the 5, for well over a decade, any passers-by could see the sharp contrast between the lush fields that still had water access and those withered and dead from dehydration.

Now, Trump has ordered the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Interior to re-evaluate the carefully manipulated and conveniently flip-flopped science of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that allowed the water restrictions to go into effect. For the policy currently in effect has proven as ineffective in saving the delta smelt as it has disastrous for farmers. In the years since the government reallocated much of the state's water to the delta smelt, its population has plummeted. In March 2014, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife counted 88 fish in a survey. One year later, that number was down to six.

Once, environmentalists could make a case that the smelt served as a legitimate keystone species for the region. But now that drought has effectively ended the fish's reign, there's no good reason to continue crippling California's agriculture.

While the rest of the country has laughed at some of California's more innocuous but absurd-sounding measures to combat their somewhat-neutralized drought, such as replacing grass lawns with rocks, the environmental lobby's assault on farming has proven devastating, resulting in double-digit unemployment in some central counties.

In tandem with the newly signed Water Infrastructure Act and amped-up rhetoric threatening to withhold federal dollars if Sacramento continues to mismanage California's water, Trump has created a realistic plan to help the country's largest exporter of agriculture to reclaim its resources. While in typical Trumpian fashion, the president has rolled out a great policy mandate with a few embellishments — no, California still doesn't have "so much water they don't know what to do with it" — the net result achieves a key campaign promise: championing the forgotten men and women in a state eager to leave them behind.