Understanding the vegetation, soil status, and their relationship on abandoned farmland plays an important role in the determination of future land use. In this study, five hilly farmlands abandoned for different periods of time (1, 3, 8, 15, and 25 years) were selected as a series of successive abandonments in the Western henan region to investigate the quantitative characteristics and species composition of the plant community and the carbon and nitrogen storage in vegetation and the soil, to analyze the natural secondary succession process of the plant community, and to discuss how the soil carbon and nitrogen pool responded to the plant community succession. The main results indicated that:The abandoned farmland communities that possessed a slow succession progress and generally included two indistinct succession stages, from annual or biennial herbs to perennial herbs and shrubs. The plant species diversity was closely related to the surrounding native vegetation. Over 25 years, herbs in the community always had an advantage status, the number of xerophytes was more than four times that of mesophytes, and the quantity of C3 plants increased gradually. The α diversity index first increased and then decreased, and the maximum values of the Margalef, Pielou and Shannon-Wiener indices were 1.53, 0.95, and 2.18, respectively. These data could provide proof that the community structure became more complex and stable after a natural succession process of 25 years. Both plant carbon storage and nitrogen storage increased as the community biomass constantly accumulated, reaching values of 313.14 g/m² and 11.69 g/m², respectively, at the 25-year succession stage. The soil carbon storage trend opposed that of soil nitrogen storage. In the climax stage (25 a), the soil carbon storage increased to 960.98 g/m², whereas the soil nitrogen storage was reduced to 27.08 g/m². Therefore, the changes in the soil property of the abandoned farmlands in the Western henan region resulted in the ecological phenomenon of "carbon fixation and nitrogen release". Redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that the community coverage, density and biomass were the main factors affecting soil carbon and nitrogen storage. The analysis of the ecological function changes of these communities showed that soil carbon storage gradually increased as the time since abandonment increased, which was beneficial to the carbon fixation of the ecosystem. However, the reduction in soil nitrogen storage in abandoned farmlands did not, contribute to the stability of the ecosystem. Thus, an increase the richness of leguminous plants in the community was suggested to promote biological immobilization of soil total nitrogen and alleviate soil nitrogen loss.