Hm, but isn't that right? You make your change in code, which doesn't touch your models (except you're no longer using the column you'd like to deprecate), and deploy that; show it's working. Then you make another change to actually remove the column from the models and generate a migration. Then you deploy that version, which migrates the db and runs your new model code?

(You could in theory remove the column but not merge the migration if you wanted to show your code worked fully without that column in your ORM model before removing it from the DB as well?)