What modpack do you use?
And what barley are you talking about? If you have PoB installed you have the barley that spawns in pasture biomes (AKA free food biome) and can't be grown at all 3 is crafted in to one wheat. Then you have that other barley that acts exactly like wheat only grows slower (in my experience) and doesn't attract cows (I think it's Natura's, Don't quote me though).
Do you have golems? or MFR? both very good methods of farming. Golems are probably the most efficient once set up all you need is one straw golem and a wood golem to pick up the produce but you will need to research a fair way in to ThaumCraft to get them.
In MFR you can make a perpetual system uitilizeing a cow paddoc (not a machine, literaly just a bunch of cows), a sewer, a composter, a planter, a fertilizer and a harvester that has tremendous production speed. But it does take some infrastructure setup and a good MJ supply (which those machines can also remedy alongside a Railcraft boiler+ 1-16 industrial engines, you just have to fill the planter with saplings).
This all depends if you have those mods though.