Low fertility of the red soils in tropical and subtropical regions of China is a major factor restricting development of the agricultural productivity of the regions. Different types of land use and/or different cultivation practices may have different impacts on soil physicochemical and biological properties. Soil nematodes play an important role in the detritus food webs, and have been used as a sensitive indicator of changes in soil ecosystems caused by different agricultural practices. In order to explore the effects of farming cultivations, different in history, on community composition of soil nematode in upland red soils, and relationships between nematode communities and soil physicochemical and microbial properties, red soil peanut fields and vegetable gardens, 10, 20 and 50 years in cultivation history, and a tract of red soil wasteland were selected for comparison in the following indices; soil organic C (SOC), total N (TN), pH, mineral N (MN), available P (AP) , microbial biomass C (MBC), microbial biomass N (MBN), microbial biomass P (MBP) , basal respiration (BR), qCO₂ and soil nematode community. It was found that compared with the wasteland, the peanut fields, regardless of cultivation history, all displayed declining trends in all indices of soil fertility, while the vegetable gardens did reversely. The 20-year old peanut field was the lowest in SOC, TN, MBC and (AP, and the 50-year old vegetable garden was significantly higher than the 10-year old one in all the indices (p < 0.05). In addition, soil nematodes showed a significant increase (p < 0.05) in the soil after 50 years of farming as vegetable garden, but it stayed almost unchanged in the 10- or 20-year old gardens from that in the wasteland. In the peanut fields,. plant-feeding nematodes gradually decreased in proportion in the soil with the cultivation going on (p < 0.05), from 45.89% in the wasteland to 2.60% in the 50-year old peanut field, while bacterial-feeding nematodes increased steadily in proportion with the cultivation going on, from 20.84% in the wasteland up to 67.29% and 54.51% in the 50-year old peanut field and vegetable garden, respectively. No significant changes, increase or decrease, were found with the proportion of fungal-feeding nematodes with the history of cultivation in the peanut fields, but significant decreases were after 20 and 50 years of cultivation in vegetable gardens (p < 0.05). Moreover, no significant difference was found either in the proportion of predators-omnivores between the peanut fields or between the vegetable gardens different in cultivation history. Analysis of nematode ecological indices shows that the soil food webs in the peanut fields were more stable than those in the vegetable gardens that were subjected to more frequent fertilization and tillage. It was found in this study that soil physicochemical and biological properties varied significantly with the cultivation going on in both the peanut fields and the vegetable gardens. Therefore, changes in soil nematode community can be used as an indicator of upland red soil ecosystems, and may provide some complementary information about structure of the red soil ecosystem, and hence help understand comprehensively dynamics of soil ecosystem of the red soil farmlands with cultivation going on.