The Rimfire Report: Remington's "Ranch Hand" 40 gr CPRN

In 2024, Remington (now part of “The Kinetic Group”) introduced a whole bunch of new ammunition lines, including several different variants of .22LR ammunition. One of those was their new Remington “Ranch Hand” ammunition, which we’ll be looking at today. Ranch Hand is an almost perfect name for the ammo if you’re trying to get people to think of it as workhorse pest-control ammunition, and today we’ll largely be judging it with that kind of performance in mind. Over the last 6 months or so, I’ve shot a collective 300 rounds of this stuff, and I have a few thoughts on what I think might be the best I’ve seen yet from Remington’s growing arsenal of .22 LR ammunition.

More Rimfire Report @ TFB:

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The Rimfire Report: Remington's "Ranch Hand" 40 gr CPRN

Product Link: https://www.remington.com/rimfire/ranch-hand/29-R21263.html

Product Overview

Your Rimfire Ride or Die Ranch Hand is Remington's most dependable 22LR round ever made. Featuring our new and improved rimfire technology, each round offers Premier high performance in your gun and on target. Ready for small game or varmints, Ranch Hand flawlessly feeds, functions and fires in all common 22LR handguns and rifles, no matter your firearm of choice. Yeehaw y'all.

For better or worse, Ranch Hand seems like it is basically just a Remington equivalent of CCI Mini-Mag 40 gr Round Nose, which we have yet to cover here on Rimfire Report. High velocity round nose is indeed loved by many a pest controller, myself included; however, more often than not, I find myself using mini-mags for Competition since they’re so reliable. Hopefully, Ranch Hand and other similar Remington High-Velocity options will prove to be sustainable alternatives if you can’t get your hands on that CCI goodness.

Reliability & Velocity Data

The first thing we need to determine is whether or not this ammo is consistent enough to be used. All three boxes of ranch hand that I’ve tried so far have worked flawlessly out of both my Fletcher Rifle Works 11/22 Takedown, the Bergara B14R used for the tests, as well as the H&K G36 22LR rifle, for one extra function check after I had disassembled and cleaned the rifle.

The numbers are about what I expected for a bulk-tier high-velocity ammunition. A standard deviation of 27 isn’t bad, but it is slightly above the threshold for what I call “good,” which is between 15 and 20 fps of standard deviation. The extreme spread is also pretty huge, but again, this is just from 50 shots, and as a reader correctly pointed out in one of our previous ammunition tests, it’s normal for the extreme spread to grow but the standard deviation not to change much as your sample size increases. So what we’re seeing here is fairly consistent ammo in terms of overall muzzle velocity. And once again, we’re seeing higher than normal velocities than advertised since we’re using a slightly longer barrel with the B14R.

I’d recommend Remington Ranch hand as a healthy alternative to CCI Mini-Mags, provided you can get them on sale for maybe 10-12 cents per round. The square 100-round sleeves make the ammo easy to toss in any pistol or rifle bag, and they seem to also be a bit tougher than the CCI 100-round sleeves, which tend to break all the time. Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this ammo and any experience you’ve had with it. Thanks as always for stopping by to read The Rimfire Report, and we’ll see you all again next week!