Mandae watershed in Gangwon province has been known as one of soil erosion hot spot watersheds within Hanggang basin. Thus numerous efforts have been made to reduce soil erosion and pollutant loads into receiving watershed. However, proper best management practices have not been suggested because no monitoring flow and water quality data were available. Thus, modeling technique could not be utilized to evaluate water quality issue properly at Mandae watershed to develop and implement the best management practices. In this study, the SWAT model was applied to the Mandae watershed, Gangwon province to evaluate the SWAT prediction ability and water quality improvement with vegetated filter strip (VFS) in this study. The Nash-Sutcliffe model efficiency (NSE) and Coefficient of determination ($R^2$) values for flow simulation were 0.715 and 0.802, respectively, and the NSE and $R^2$ values were 0.903 and 0.920 for T-P simulation indicating the SWAT can be used to simulate flow and T-P with acceptable accuracies. The SWAT model, calibrated for flow and T-P, was used to evaluate water quality improvement with the VFS in agricultural fields. It was found that approximately 56.19 % of T-P could be reduced with vegetated filter strip of 5 m at the edge of agricultural fields within the watershed (34.86 % reduction with VFS of 1m, 48.29 % with VFS of 3 m). As shown in this study, the T-P, which plays key roles in eutrophication in the waterbodies, can be reduced with proper installation of the VFS.