The Huaihe River basin is suffering from serious soil erosion in recent decades. Thus, it is urgent to control the soilerosion. Commonly used measures to maintain water and soil are returning farmland to forests, as it is an important agriculturalproduction area in China, large -scale return of arable land to forests is unrealistic. Adjusting the type of arable land formaintaining water and soil is an alternative way to balance the contradictions between economic development and ecologicalprotection. In order to analyze the effects of different types of arable land on hydrology and sediment yield in a basin, the SWATmodel was constructed for the upper catchment of the Xixian hydrological station in the Huaihe River which takes both the paddyfield and the dry land into account. Three scenarios were considered as follows: (A) Actual arable land use method, (B) all arableland is paddy field, and (C) all arable land are dry lands. The results show that the SWAT model has good accuracy insimulations of runoff and sediment in the Xixian basin, both of the R2 and NSE (Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency) values are greater than0.75. The two different types of arable land in paddy fields and dry land have little impacts on the annual averageevapotranspiration and annual average runoff of the basin, but have a greater impact on the sediment yield, especially in floodseasons. Compared to dry land, the paddy field could decrease the sediment yield in the range from 33.5t to 491.8t, with anaverage of 208.7t during the simulation period. This study suggests that taking paddy field cultivation is more conducive toreducing soil erosion in the Xixian River basin than dryland cultivation.