I've used south in the past even during development because it seemed like the only way to edit fields in models.

However, when the data isn't useful such as when initially developing the project or an app, using south to migrate new fields in or out is a waste of time and adds unnecessary steps to deploying the code initially.

This isn't documented anywhere, but to quickly re-create your app with the new fields added/removed correctly and all data cleared, this single line will do it all and not change the deploy process to include a migration:

./manage.py sqlreset \<app-name> | ./manage.py dbshell