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Using Fabric, I prefer to keep a pristine version of my crontab locally, that way I know exactly what is on production and can easily edit entries in addition to adding them.
The fabric script I use looks something like this (some code redacted e.g. taking care of backups):
def deploy_crontab():
put('crontab', '/tmp/crontab')
sudo('crontab < /tmp/crontab')
I use Buildout to manage my Django projects. With Buildout, I use z3c.recipe.usercrontab to install cron jobs in deploy or update.