Another one of the engineers here. While using ActiveRecord migrations will work for production systems, when setting up development or test systems using rake db:schema:load will not actually insert those records. Since rake db:schema:load is simply loading the current schema from schema.rb, you will still have to add those records into seeds.

As an alternative approach; we take a similar view to the grandparent, but run a full set of migrations instead of just copying the schema.

It actually works quite well. The tradeoff being that it may take a little longer, but we're typically talking tenths of a second.

Ah, interesting, thanks for the explanation - I was wondering the same thing as your parent. I always do db:migrate instead of db:schema:load, but I can see the advantages of avoiding that (particularly if you have tons and tons of migrations).