The appraiser split land and trees. My lender will only lend on the dirt.

Start with the trees, because the financing question is downstream of it. 24 years on navel isn't old exactly, plenty of blocks run to 35 or 40, but yield per acre and fruit size drift and the varieties in the ground 24 years ago aren't what packers want now. 415 bins across 46 acres is roughly 9 bins an acre and that's a modest number. Ask him what it was in year 12. If it was 16 an acre then you're buying a declining block and the lender's depreciating-improvement view is closer to right than yours.

The handshake with the packer is worth nothing to you. It's worth something to him. Get in front of that packer yourself before you close and find out whether they'd take your fruit and on what terms.

That treatment isn't the ag officer being difficult. Most real estate secured programs value the collateral as land and permanent improvements with an assigned economic life, and a 24 year old block has a short remaining life on their schedule, so it contributes little to the advance rate. Terms and program rules differ by lender and change, so get their actual advance policy in writing rather than a verbal from the officer.

Where the rest of the money usually comes from is a different structure. Some ag lenders will do a separate operating or crop-secured facility that looks at the cash flow instead of the collateral, priced higher and shorter. Farm Credit institutions underwrite permanent plantings routinely and will at least look at it differently from a general purpose bank. And seller carry in second position is the obvious gap filler here, except your first lender has to allow subordinate debt, which many won't at 65 LTV without approval.

Run the deal at 139k of bank debt plus a 130k seller note and see whether 27k of net covers both payments. My guess from your numbers is it doesn't, and that's the real answer.

Worth saying: the 27k is his net with his labor, his equipment and his water. Yours will be different.

The one thing I'd want is three years of actual packer settlement statements, not a summary he typed up. That's what I'd ask for on a rental and I don't see why fruit is different.

Two separate things are getting mixed in your post, and separating them changes what you do next.

The first is valuation. An appraiser splitting land from permanent plantings is standard practice on orchard property, because the plantings are a wasting asset with a finite productive life while the underlying land is not. The split itself isn't an error to argue with. What you can question is the remaining-life assumption behind the 147k, and the way to do that is with a horticultural assessment of the block rather than an appeal letter. Tree count per acre, missing tree percentage, rootstock, and recent yield trend all feed that number.

The second is credit policy. Advance rates against permanent plantings vary by institution and by loan program, and they change, so confirm the current policy in writing with any lender before you build a structure around it. Lenders that specialize in permanent-crop agriculture generally underwrite plantings differently from general purpose real estate lenders, which is why the same property can support very different debt at two institutions.

On the economics: your 6.9 percent figure is derived from the seller's operating result, and orchard investors typically retain operating risk, meaning weather events, water cost, and commodity price all land on you rather than on a tenant. That's the trade for the higher yield relative to a passive land lease. A cash rent structure on the same block would produce a lower number with far less variance.

The assumption your whole deal rests on is remaining productive life. If the block has 8 good years left, you're paying 5,600 an acre for ground worth 3,000 plus eight years of uncertain net. If it has 15, the arithmetic is different. Get that answered before you solve the financing.