You can use a lens to break the crops, or the drum that was mentioned.
It's "from nothing" because you can completely automate for example charcoal production and feed them into endoflames, endlessly. I meant "nothing" as in a renewable and automated powersource, after you set it up you don't have to do anything, it will just run forever.
You can put a redstone mana spreader facing upward with a bore lens toward another mana spreader, have a handthingy place a dirt block and another place a sapling on it, then send a burst up when it grows to take out the whole tree. Can use birch/spruce/jungle trees or cap the growth on oaks by lowering the spreader on top to make sure there's no branches. The spreader on top catches the burst and returns it.
I know I asked for it, but ouch. =p
The resource costs might be ok, but I think the mana costs are a bit high. That's a ton of mana for one manasteel, it's like 10 million RF or so worth of coal/lava (I think).
Also you need a mana diamond or pearl to make a runic altar, unless you change that, or don't plan to do the same with mana pearls which can otherwise be used as an alternative for a lot of the mana diamond recipes.
That's "technically" true, which is why I said "realistically." =p
It's like 10 minutes in a vat with 2 buckets of lava to turn a single hardened ore into a normal ore. I don't see anyone bothering with that.