Quincy Farmer-Consumer Awareness Day Beyond the Parade

In 1981, a Quincy farmer named Dennis Higashiyama was listening to Paul Harvey on the radio when he heard a story that stuck with him. A woman had complained to her grocer about the price of food, and when the grocer explained that her money covered his bills, his employees' wages, the processors, and eventually the farmer, she shot back that maybe farmers weren't necessary at all. Where did she think her food came from, anyway? Her answer: "From Safeway, naturally."

Higashiyama decided the gap between that woman's kitchen and the fields outside town needed closing, and he did it the way small agricultural towns often do: he threw a party for it. Forty-five years later, that party is still running, still on the second Saturday of every September, and this year it lands on September 12, 2026. If you've lived in Quincy for any stretch of time, you already know Farmer-Consumer Awareness Day, or FCAD, by its most visible piece: the parade that closes downtown streets for the morning. What most people miss is that the parade is the middle of the day, not the point of it.

A Parade Sandwiched Between Two Bigger Things

FCAD runs in three distinct movements, in two different parts of town, and most residents only ever experience the loudest one in the middle.

It starts quietly. In recent years the day has opened at Memorial Park with a Veterans Recognition Ceremony, where new names are added to Quincy's Veterans Wall. There's no marching band here, no float, no candy thrown to kids on the curb. It's a small civic moment that happens before most people have finished breakfast, and it has nothing to do with agriculture at all. It's just Quincy taking care of Quincy before the bigger crowd shows up.

Then downtown wakes up. The Grand Parade rolls through around mid-morning, and it's the version of FCAD that ends up in everyone's photos: the Quincy High School Marching Band, antique tractors, local dance groups like Ballet Sol Y Luna, community floats, farm equipment drivers waving from the cab. This is the part that gets covered by the local paper every year, and it's genuinely worth seeing. But it's also the shortest of the day's three chapters, and if a resident treats it as the whole event, they leave right when things get interesting.

Because after the parade, the entire event relocates. The festivities move to Quincy Middle School and run well into the evening, and this is where FCAD actually does the thing Higashiyama built it to do.

What's Actually Happening at Quincy Middle School

The Quincy Middle School grounds are where the farm-to-consumer bridge gets built each year. Local growers and processors open up for tours, giving residents a look inside agricultural and packaging facilities that aren't normally open to the public. It's a genuinely different kind of access than driving past a field on Highway 28. You're standing inside the operation, talking to the people who run it, on a day when that's specifically the point.

Around the tour schedule, the grounds fill in with a tractor pull, a car show, a quilt show, a produce sale, and a cook-off, plus food and craft vendors and live entertainment through the day. In past years the event has drawn a crowd in the thousands, organized year to year by the Quincy FCAD Committee rather than a city department or a paid events company. That's worth noting: this isn't a tourism-board production. It's built by the same farmers and neighbors it's celebrating, which is part of why it's lasted 45 years without turning into something else.

For anyone who's only ever caught the parade, the tours and the tractor pull are the parts that make the origin story make sense. Higashiyama's whole idea was to let people see, firsthand, what agriculture actually involves. A float going by does that in miniature. Standing inside a packing facility for twenty minutes does it for real.

Building Your Own Saturday Around It

If you want to actually get the shape of the day right instead of just catching the parade and heading home, a few things are worth planning around.

Expect downtown streets along the parade route to be closed for part of the morning, so if you're running errands on Saturday, build in extra time or plan around it. The festivities at Quincy Middle School run for most of the day, so there's no need to rush from the parade straight there and back, you can treat it as an actual afternoon rather than a quick stop.

Because the exact hour-by-hour schedule can shift slightly from year to year, including whether a fun run is part of the lineup, the most reliable place to check before you head out is quincyfcad.org, the event's own site.

If you want to extend the day past FCAD, it's worth remembering that Quincy's agricultural identity isn't limited to row crops and orchards. The benches above the Columbia River just outside town sit inside the Ancient Lakes AVA, one of Washington's cooler wine-growing regions, home to vineyards planted by families like the Bryans at Cave B Estate and Cameron Fries at White Heron Cellars, along with larger growers like Jones of Washington and Milbrandt Farms working land overlooking Evergreen Lake. None of that is part of the official FCAD program, but it's the same underlying story: land around Quincy that produces something specific enough to have its own name. A Saturday that starts with a Veterans ceremony at Memorial Park and a farm tour at Quincy Middle School can end with a glass of Riesling grown in the same hills you can see from town.

Why the Structure Matters More Than the Spectacle

It would be easy to write FCAD off as a nice small-town tradition and leave it there. But the fact that it still runs in three parts across two locations, 45 years after a farmer got annoyed at something he heard on the radio, says something about how Quincy sees itself. The parade is the part built for spectators. The tours and the tractor pull are the parts built for participants. And the Veterans ceremony that opens the day isn't about agriculture at all, it's just the town taking a moment before the crowds arrive.

Most people who've lived here for years have never seen all three. That's not a criticism. It's just a reminder that even a tradition this old still has pieces worth discovering, if you build your Saturday around the whole thing instead of the ten minutes that happen to be loudest.

If you're new to the area or you're the kind of person who likes actually understanding the place you live, September 12 is as good a day as any to see Quincy do what it's been doing every second Saturday in September since 1981. Show up at Memorial Park before you show up downtown, and don't leave when the parade ends. That's when the day actually starts.

For more on what makes this stretch of Grant County worth calling home, or if you have questions about the neighborhoods and land around Quincy, Medie Ruiz is always glad to talk. Let's Connect.