About Top Crop Manager

Top Crop Manager

Overview

Top Crop Manager is Canada's magazine of crop production and technology, published by Annex Business Media from Simcoe, Ontario. It appears in two regional editions — Top Crop Manager West, for the large-acre field-crop growers of the Prairie provinces, and Top Crop Manager East, for field-crop producers in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada — supported by a single national website at topcropmanager.com and a programme of conferences and specialty guides.

The magazine's editorial promise is applied agronomy. Its issues take research findings from universities, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada stations and provincial extension services and translate them into decisions farmers can use: what to seed, how to feed it, how to protect it from weeds, disease and insects, and what machinery and technology will pay. Annex's portfolio description stresses the forward look — agronomic and industry topics addressed with an eye on what is coming in the next one to three years, spanning plant breeding, fertility and nutrients, the seed and chemical industries, farm equipment, markets and business management.

History

Top Crop Manager grew out of the Agri-Book Magazine series, a set of annual editions each dedicated to specific crops that began in the 1970s. In a 2011 redesign editorial, the magazine dated its own introduction as Agri-Book Magazine to 1974; its founding editor, in a retrospective published on the magazine's website, recalled that "from its inception in 1989 as it developed from the Agri-Book Magazine series of annual editions, it has developed steadily to become a fully fledged crop technology focussed magazine." Trade directory listings likewise record 1989 as the year Top Crop Manager was first published, for both the eastern and western editions. Annex's events division today bills the title as a source the industry has relied on for more than 50 years, a claim consistent with the brand's Agri-Book roots.

The founding editor's retrospective also sets out the test the magazine applied to its own journalism: "The bottom line for our writers has always been to ask ourselves 'have we provided something that can help a reader make or save significant additional profit over time?'" The same account charts the changes the magazine chronicled across its first two decades — the widespread adoption of no-till planting and direct seeding, the arrival of herbicide-tolerant traits in an ever-widening range of crops, and the approach of market-driven end-use traits — a record of how thoroughly Canadian field-crop production was re-made in those years, and of the magazine's role as the trade's interpreter of research.

The two-edition structure was in place by the mid-2000s. A September 2006 announcement of a content partnership with Farms.com described seven western issues and four eastern issues a year, plus specialty editions, covering cereals, canola, corn, soybeans, potatoes and other crops; under that agreement, Top Crop Manager readers gained access to Farms.com's daily commodity prices and weather, and Farms.com carried the magazine's agronomy content on its Canada East and West homepages. A 2012 western-edition masthead listed the magazine at Annex's Simcoe address with Diane Kleer as group publisher and Bruce Barker as western field editor, the start of a long association between Barker and the title's machinery and field coverage.

Editorial leadership has since turned over on both editions. Directory listings recorded Stefanie Croley as a western editor and Alex Barnard as editor of the eastern edition; by 2026 the western editor was Kaitlin Berger, while Jillian Filmer — who joined Annex in April 2025 as editor of Top Crop Manager East and Fruit & Vegetable — introduced herself to eastern readers in an October 2025 editorial that underlined the magazine's research-first mandate.

Content and Coverage

The magazine is organized around the crop-production calendar. Core coverage areas include cereals, canola and oilseeds, corn, soybeans and pulses; weed management, disease and insect control; soil fertility and nutrient stewardship; seed varieties and traits; and precision-agriculture technology. Regular franchises include the Machinery Manager features, an annual Weed Control Guide and specialty fungicide guides published with the magazine. Online, the Agronomy Update series carries shorter, in-season research items between issues — in the summer of 2026 these ranged from spider-mite scouting and barley yellow dwarf virus management to lodging in cereals and Bt-resistant European corn borer.

The website's news file shows the breadth of the brief: Canadian Grain Commission grading changes, crop-condition reporting from the Prairies, research on Fusarium assessment and perennial forages, and policy and trade news that bears on crop producers. Features are fact-checked against the research community the magazine serves — as a former field editor put it, every article is checked to ensure the information is technically accurate and agronomically sound.

Top Crop Manager also convenes its audience in person. The Top Crop Summit, its agronomy conference, held its eleventh annual edition in Saskatoon in February 2026, drawing researchers and industry experts to present practical production sessions. The event expanded to Alberta with an inaugural summit in Grande Prairie in November 2025, and a second Alberta Top Crop Summit was scheduled for November 2026.

Audience and Reach

The audiences of the two editions are defined by region and scale. Directory listings describe the western edition's readers as progressive, large-acre field-crop growers in Western Canada, published nine times a year, and the eastern edition's as field-crop producers in Eastern Canada, published four times a year. Readership figures are dated: the 2006 Farms.com announcement reported that the western edition was read by 29,000 leading farmers and the eastern edition by 22,000 — those numbers are the publisher's own from that release and are not current audited figures. Annex also positions the magazine as a trusted resource among government extension personnel, university researchers, certified crop advisors and industry stakeholders, a secondary audience that shapes its research-heavy tone.

Digital Presence

Topcropmanager.com operates as a daily news and features service in its own right, with items dated through August 2026 on its front page at the time of writing, covering features, news, machinery, webinars and videos, an events calendar and an archive of digital editions. The site also hosts the magazine's involvement in Annex's agriculture-wide programmes: Top Crop Manager is a presenting brand of the AgAnnex Talks podcast channel and of the Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture (IWCA) recognition programme, and its two editors took part in the IWCA's first virtual roundtable with the 2026 honourees. E-newsletter subscriptions are offered on their own or combined with the print magazine.

Ownership and Organisation

Top Crop Manager is published by Annex Business Media, the Simcoe-based B2B publisher, as part of an agriculture group that also includes Canadian Poultry, Potatoes in Canada, Fruit & Vegetable, Manure Manager, Drainage Contractor and Greenhouse Canada. Annex's portfolio pages and trade directory listings name Michelle Bertholet as group publisher for the agriculture titles, including both Top Crop Manager editions. The editions have separate editors — Kaitlin Berger in the West and Jillian Filmer in the East as of 2026 — working from the Simcoe head office with a contributor network of researchers, agronomists and field editors across the crop-growing regions.

Contact and Availability

Top Crop Manager is published by Annex Business Media, 105 Donly Drive South (P.O. Box 530), Simcoe, Ontario N3Y 4N5; the directory-listed telephone number is 519-429-3966. Subscriptions to the eastern and western print editions, and to the combined magazine-and-e-news packages, are handled through topcropmanager.com, where readers can also register for the Top Crop Summit, browse past digital editions and hear the magazine's editors on the AgAnnex Talks podcast. There is no charge for qualified readers on the controlled-circulation lists recorded in the magazine's earlier mastheads, and current subscription offers are listed on the website.