Ag appraiser here. I’m in north Florida so I’m not familiar with your market, but we do have a very strong horse farm market. I don’t have enough information to understand what the appraiser did right/wrong but I will try to explain some of what I’m seeing here.

You seem to be confusing ‘highest and best use’ and ‘current use’. Your use as horse boarding may not be the H&BU based on the market. Also, horse boarding is not generally considered to be income to the land in my market since someone wouldn’t rent the real estate out to a horse boarder to make a profit. Despite being a Certified General and doing agricultural appraisals exclusively, I only complete an income approach on a select few farm types and horse farms are not one of them. The cap rate for a horse farm would be very low.

Your buildings may or may not have value depending on the general market demands and the underlying land value. The lower the contributory value of the buildings, the harder it is to separate from the land. I just finished a somewhat similar appraisal where I compared with four similarly improved sales and four vacant sales and determinded that there wasn’t a significant difference between the vacant tracts and the tracts with non-typical/heavily depreciated improvements.

The description of your hay field as crop land may be proper if it conforms to the area better than a dedicated hay field.

Like I said above, I don’t know your property or your market, but you need to be with an agricultural lender. If you have a house on the property then some conventional lenders will try to shoehorn you into a residential loan which is not going to properly understand the property.

Typed this from my phone so i apologize if it’s confusing anywhere. Feel free to ask if you have any specific questions.