When it comes to smelting use the TC smeltery, which doubles the ore ingot ratio. But all in all, since you have an endless amout of ore it's not really required. Only if you use the tinkers tools.
For early RF production i tend to use the steam engines, building a low pressure boiler with solid fuel is probably the best and easiest solution. Since you can grow coal in large and infinite amounts, increasing efficiency is not really necessary. A lowpressure boiler will handle 9 industrial steam engines and is very fuel-efficient.
In my world i build a wood and sapling farm, processed the wood in atm 8 cokeovens into charcoal, put the charcoal into an bloodmagic alchemy set to create coal. The coal will be put into another set of ovens to create cokecoal.
Saplings will be processed into biomass and ethanol to fuel another lowpressure boiler. The goal is to get one liquid boiler run on creosote oil. For this i need about 21 cokeovens running nonstop