can someone help me identify this caterpillar please

Hello Everyone

I will include photos of my decimated veggies and the caterpillar. For the last 3 weeks I have been coming to find many of my carrots and kale cut at the base with the top just laying there and many just eaten. Most of the damage seemed to have been occurring at night. Today I found this caterpillar eating one of the carrot plants. What is the likelihood that this type of caterpillar has been causing most of the damage? Or I just happened to have caught this one in action, but he is one of a whole variety of bugs eating the plants? What type of caterpillar is this? And finally, what suggestions do people have that could assist me in allowing my veggies to grow to harvest time?

Thank you

Are you in the United States?  It could be the Yellowstriped Armyworm.  https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/yellowstriped-armyworm

Where I live on the high plains we sometimes get huge numbers of fall armyworms that love everyone's irrigated fescue.  They will happily eat my clover too so I know they're not picky.

EDIT: I should add that BT is organic and will take care of them if you want to go that route.  I'm sure crawling across the top of diatomaceous earth would also not be a fun experience for them.

cutworm of some sort. named for the way they just cut stuff off at ground level, i suspect.

those kinds of worms, a physical barrier (toilet paper roll, or even a net over a garden bed) can help.

Best I could come up with was one of the army worms, and the link to yellow striped army worm looks good.  It does have a pretty distinctive pattern. Here's another link - looks like it overwinters as a pupa in the soil.  Catch and put it well away from the veggies?

Another thing that can help is giving them something else to eat.  If they are striped armyworms, from the link Anna gave, they seem to eat a wide variety of plants, then a) your plants have a better chance of being missed and b) their predators may turn up and deal with them and the next generation for you.

"Are you in the United States?  It could be the Yellowstriped Armyworm.  https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/yellowstriped-armyworm"

I've encountered quite a number of pupa in the soil that look like that.

Tereza Okava wrote:those kinds of worms, a physical barrier (toilet paper roll, or even a net over a garden bed) can help.

I am trying the physical barrier method. Started yesterday, so far no losses.

Nancy Reading wrote:Another thing that can help is giving them something else to eat.  If they are striped armyworms, from the link Anna gave, they seem to eat a wide variety of plants, then a) your plants have a better chance of being missed and b) their predators may turn up and deal with them and the next generation for you.

I've noticed that the weeds were getting eaten too, so now I stopped weeding so meticulously and hopefully they will fill up on things besides my veggies.

If I had armyworms I would treat them like I did with hornworms.

One years we had hundreds of hornworms on our honeysuckle.

I pick each of them off and dropped them in a pail of water thus they drowned ...