Want to boost your mowing output but don’t want to invest in a big triple? Today, there’s a burgeoning choice of slightly wider mower conditioner models, including Pöttinger’s 3.88m wide Novacat 402 ED, which has been dropping grass in our test fields

Mounted mower conditioners with a working width of up to 4.0m aren’t new … and neither are the associated problems of the extra stress on the tractor’s linkage — the bigger the mower, the bigger the risk of the left-hand wheel ‘cocking a leg’. On the new Novacat 402, Pöttinger looks to counter this imbalance by adding a chunk of ballast, in a similar way to what McHale’s done on its smaller mowers. First thing to point out is that Pöttinger is a tad generous with the working width of the 402, which is not 4.00m as you would assume, but actually 3.88m.