Every two years, a working forest in Warwickshire turns into the largest gathering of forestry and arboriculture machinery in the country, and this September marks a milestone: APF's Golden Anniversary, fifty years since the show began. APF 2026 runs from September 24 to 26 at Ragley Estate, and ArboStar will be there, bringing a stand, a live look at the platform, and a lot of questions for the crews who stop by. If you run a tree care or forestry operation and haven't been to APF before, here's what the show involves and where you'll find us on the ground.

APF, short for the Arboricultural and Forestry Machinery Exhibition, is a biennial trade show organized by APF International Forest Machinery Exhibition Ltd, an Edinburgh-based company that has run the event since the 1970s. This year's edition marks the show's fiftieth anniversary, half a century of bringing the forestry, woodland, arboricultural, fencing, and grounds maintenance sectors together on one site.

The scale is what sets it apart from a typical trade show. Recent editions have drawn around 320 exhibitors and 23,000 visitors, with roughly two kilometers of working machinery on display and an estimated £80 million worth of equipment on the ground at any given time. About 95 percent of attendees are trade professionals rather than the general public, so most conversations on the show floor are practical: which harvester head actually holds up in wet ground, which chipper a crew switched to and why, what a stump grinder costs to run over a season.

When and Where Is APF 2026 Held?

The show runs Thursday through Saturday, September 24 to 26, 2026, at Ragley Estate in Warwickshire. Because the site is a working country estate rather than a convention center, most of the exhibition happens outdoors, with machinery demonstrations spread across open ground rather than confined to a hall. Free parking is included with entry, and the organizers publish a show program closer to the date covering site layout and daily schedules.

APF isn't a sit-in-a-conference-room kind of event. The program centers on live demonstrations and competitions, so you'll see equipment felling, processing, and moving timber in real conditions rather than sitting static on a stand. Exhibitors span the full range of the sector, from harvesters and forwarders to climbing gear, fencing equipment, and grounds maintenance tools, which means a tree care business can compare climbing kit at one stand and a mulcher at the next without leaving the field.

For a company evaluating new equipment, that side-by-side comparison is worth more than any spec sheet. You can watch two competing brands run the same task back to back and talk to the operators about what breaks down first.

Tickets and Getting In

Advance tickets are cheaper than paying at the gate, and sales close 10 days before the show opens.

Meet ArboStar at APF 2026

ArboStar will be at stand E2a for all three days of APF 2026, September 24 to 26. Stop by for a live walkthrough of the platform, from mobile estimating in the field to crew scheduling and business intelligence back at the office. No pitch required if you just want to talk shop about running crews across a busy season.

Most conversations we have on a show floor start the same way. A business grew from two crews to seven or eight, and the spreadsheet that used to work now falls apart by Tuesday afternoon. Estimates get written on paper in a truck and re-typed at the office that evening, sometimes wrong, sometimes not typed at all before the next storm job pulls everyone's attention. Equipment gets double-booked because nobody can see what the other crew already reserved.

None of that is a people problem. It's what happens when a business outgrows the tools it started with, and it tends to hit right around the point where a company is buying the kind of machinery on display at APF. A new harvester or a second chipper truck is a real capital decision, and it deserves the same visibility into utilization and job costing as the crews running it.

ArboStar is built specifically for tree care and forestry operations rather than adapted from generic field service software, so the terminology and workflows match how a climbing crew or a ground crew actually works.

• Mobile estimating in the field. Crews build and send quotes from a phone or tablet on site, instead of writing notes down and re-entering them later.

• Live crew and equipment tracking. A dispatcher can see where every truck, chipper, and crew is on a map in real time, which cuts down on the kind of double-booking that wastes a morning.

• Job costing and business intelligence. Owners can see which jobs, crews, and equipment are actually profitable, not just which ones are busy.

• Integrated CRM. Leads picked up at a show like APF, or from a storm season spike in calls, get tracked and followed up on automatically instead of sitting in someone's inbox.

Between the demos in the field, spend some time with us at the stand and we'll show you how the same visibility applies to your own crews.

When is APF 2026?

APF 2026 runs from Thursday, September 24 to Saturday, September 26, 2026.

Where is APF 2026 held?

The show takes place at Ragley Estate in Warwickshire, United Kingdom.

How much do APF 2026 tickets cost?

Advance tickets range from £25 for a single day to £65 for all three days, with a group rate of £23 per person for parties of 10 or more. On-the-day tickets cost £30, and children under 16 get in free.

Where can I find ArboStar at APF 2026?

Look for us at stand E2a. ArboStar is on site for all three days of the show, September 24 to 26.

See the full show details on the official APF Exhibition website, and if you'd rather not wait until September, you can book a free ArboStar demo any time. For more on running a growing tree care operation, browse the ArboStar Education Hub or see current plans on the pricing page.