White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced Monday that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead. A memorandum signed by President Donald Trump withdrawing from the proposed trade deal with 12 Pacific Rim nations was largely symbolic, because it was never ratified due to congressional opposition. The TPP was strongly backed by the Obama administration.

If the deal had gone through, California fruit and nut growers could have raked in $562 million in sales thanks to lower tariffs or the elimination of tariffs, the American Farm Bureau estimated. Dairy producers could have potentially pulled in $53 million in added revenue, according to the Fresno Bee.

On the campaign trail President Trump promised to kill the deal, so it's not exactly a surprise. But that doesn't mean it's easier for California's agriculture sector to swallow.

California Farm Bureau President Paul Wenger says the state's farmers want access to Asia's growing middle-class markets.

"Unfortunately, we have never had real good access to a lot of those markets. They come with some pretty significant tariffs or non-tariff trade barriers. So TPP for agriculture was a way to break down some of those barriers and give us access to the world consumer," Wenger says.

So what kinds of trade barriers do California goods currently face that a deal like the TPP could potentially remove?

"A lot of times it's a pest, a codling moth, a naval orange worm or something like that. They'll say, 'Well, because you have the codling moth in California we're not going to allow your product to come into our country.' And there's no clear guidelines. ... So when you go through a TPP type of agreement, you usually establish what are those metrics that we have to meet, and let's make sure we know what they are, rather than when the product is already in transit," Wenger says.

Not only can a large volume of agricultural goods spoil while held up in port in that scenario, according to Wenger, "usually what you see in situations like that [is] they'll look the other way if the price for the product comes down."

Given that a lot of farmers in the Central Valley voted for Trump, would Wenger now say they voted against their interests?

"No, I wouldn't say that at all. A lot of folks that voted for Donald Trump were worried about the stance on trade, although the Clinton campaign also was anti-TPP. We'll see how it goes now. It looks like the die has been cast," Wenger says.