It's a setting in CofH core, it's (I think) to accommodate the lack of having a quarry or digital miner (you can get most of the resources easily enough but you do still have to mine yourself, same deal with the pump - no heavy automation was one of the design goals, and having pumps would just mean "nether pump + magmatic generator" would become the best power option).
If you want something smaller and less laggy than a treefarm but you've got that set up already you might want to consider converting it into a biofuel plant growing farm, feeding a biofuel reactor from that and using the biofuel in combustion engines. It doesn't have the 'power bleed' that the steam engines have that way, so it won't run once it fills up. Alternatively you can go with a sewer (and pigs/cows) with sugarcane farm setup, it seems to be a lot less laggy though the sugarcane farms need to be large..
Finding a workable power system is one of the biggest challenges in this pack, there's still a bunch of interesting ways to do it though - though none of them are convenient. Mob-spawner/grinder to lxp (and combustion engines) seems to be the most common high-end power setup.