Short answers, pulled from the story.
An agricultural flail consists of a short thick club called a swingle attached by a rope or leather thong to a wooden handle. Farmers in Quebec made wheat flails from two pieces of wood with specific dimensions where the handle was about 18 inches long by 2 inches in diameter and the second stick measured about 30 inches long by 1 inch in diameter.
Minnesota law requires that wild rice can only be harvested legally using manual means with a canoe alongside a flail made of smooth round wood no more than 30 inches long. This regulation preserves indigenous practices while protecting the resource itself because farmers cannot use mechanical devices on these waters under current statutes.
One of the first recorded uses of a flail as a weapon occurred at the siege of Damietta in 1218 during the Fifth Crusade. Matthew Paris depicted this event in his chronicle though several references predate it and tradition holds that Frisian Hayo of Wolvega bashed the standard bearer of Muslim defenders with it.
One proposal suggests the two-piece baton known in Okinawan kobudō as the nunchaku originated from farm flails. These improvised weapons appeared whenever peasants faced armed opponents without access to swords or spears and the transition from field to battlefield happened naturally during times of conflict.
In ancient Egypt what has popularly been interpreted as a flail was a symbol associated with the pharaoh said to symbolize the monarch's ability to provide for the people through harvest and abundance. Artwork shows pharaohs holding both the crook and flail together in ceremonial poses yet currently it is still not known exactly what the implement seen in artwork actually was.