The final feature film for superstar Claudette Colbert. Her previous film was Texas Lady (1955) and she would not appear again on any screen, large or small, until the mini-series The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987).
The tobacco being grown in this film is called Connecticut Shade tobacco. First planted around 1900, at its height over 20,000 acres were planted. As of 2018, around 2,000 acres are being cultivated yearly. The leaf is highly prized by premium cigar makers for use as the outer layer, or wrapper, for their products.
Coincidentally, at the time of this film's production in 1960, there was an epidemic of blue mold that destroyed one third of the tobacco crop, costing millions.
Joshua Logan originally wanted Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh to play the parents, and he tested Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda, among others, for the younger characters.
In the scene in Raike's office where Raike talks to Parrish about irrigation, he mentions that "it just so happens that Sekulovich is irrigating" his fields. Sekulovich is Karl Malden's real name. He would often manage to work his name into dialogue, as most famously in Patton (1970) and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) when he's naming the prisoners in solitary to the new warden.